Original post created by FlagstaffMom in https://www.reddit.com/flagstaffacademy/.

Supplements

• Board of Directors Meeting Agenda 2019-03-19 - Sheet1 (1)
• 2019-2020 Master Calendar for Approval

Summary

Some highlights from the meeting are: The April Board meeting has been rescheduled. Instead of being held on Tuesday, April 2nd, it will be held on Monday, April 8th. 2019-2020 Calendar Modifications:

• School will start on Wednesday, August 14th, one day later than usual.
• The elementary school will move to a quarterly system as opposed to the trimester system in the past.
• Parent teacher conferences in the spring will be pushed forward to just before Spring Break.

The Budget Draft presented at the meeting was not posted online so I couldn't see the details. There was a high level overview discussion of the line items, which you can read further in the notes. Budget Discussion Highlights:

• Linda Arnold will be retiring in June. Kim McCain will be taking over the work with Abstract Insights.
• The school would like to hire a full time Behavioral Interventionist. There is no space in the building for the person with this position so they will likely carve out a section of the elementary art room since there are no longer big installations in there. However, there would be no HVAC or sprinklers so money would have to be spent to make accommodations for that. Estimates on that are coming in around $40,000 because of the mechanical aspects of that change.
• FA's liability and property insurance, which includes Chromebook insurance, is going up 52% due to all of the recent natural disasters and the like. In 2017, the pool paid out more claims than the previous four years combined so they depleted their reserves and this is them passing that on to us.
• Bids are being put out for a new custodial service because they have not been happy with the service.

Detailed Notes

1. Opening
2. Call to Order
3. Pledge of Allegiance, Roll Call, Recital of Mission Statement
   1. Board members present: Bob, Cary, Leah, Kumar, Stuart (late 5:31pm)
4. Public Comment
   1. None
5. Recognitions and Appreciations
   1. Pancake Breakfast was a big success.
6. Approval of Agenda
   1. MOTION: Leah motioned to approve the Board of Directors Meeting Agenda for March 19, 2019. Kumar seconded.
   2. Discussion: None
   3. VOTE: Vote on the motion as amended. The ayes have it and the motion carries.

II. Board / Administrative Working Session

1. Propose to change the meeting from Tuesday, April 2nd to Monday, April 8th. Leah made a motion to change the meeting and Cary seconded it. Vote on the motion passed.

III. General Working Session

1. 2019/2020 Master School Calendar
   1. Teachers preferred the one day later than the district start of school. We will have more time for teacher inservice. Katie said that she thought the Middle School Back to School night was supposed to be pushed to the next week, but that is not reflected on the calendar. Katie suggests moving the New Middle Schoolers day to the way it usually is, being the day before school starts. Cary asks how they received feedback from the teachers. Wayne says that the principals met with the team leads and got feedback that way. Katie says that the elementary school wants to go to quarters instead of trimesters, so we’re going to do that now. It will have more continuity with the conferences and more continuity with the middle school. Most elementaries in the school district on the trimester, but most schools aren’t K-8. There will be an additional grading period for teachers, but it doesn’t have that big of an impact. Conferences in the spring will be pushed out a bit to just before Spring Break. Kumar asks Wayne if, based on his experience, parents will be ok with this. Wayne says yes and explains that he has talked to some parents about it and they generally want to do what is best for teachers and kids. Leah moves to approve the calendar and Cary seconds the motion. It passes.
2. 2019/2020 Budget
   1. The budget draft was not posted online and I cannot read the screen.
   2. Linda Arnold will be done working (retiring) in June for all of her schools. Her youngest is graduating high school. Kim McCain is working for Abstract Insights. Linda reviewed Kim’s experience and explains that Kim will be the new Linda. They are working on transitioning work over now. Kim will attend the finance committee meeting tomorrow.
   3. Wayne says that the Budget Draft they’re showing on the screen is super high level. Wayne explains that the vote will occur on April 8th and that this is just for discussion. If the Board wants clarity on anything, Wayne can bring that on April 8th.
   4. Currently, we are almost 15 students up from this year in terms of enrollment. We know that we have loss over the summer, but he is being conservative for us not to have a hit. Tuition (Kindergarten) - He knows there are discussions where Gov. Polis wants to fund full day kindergarten. We would not charge our parents for full day kindergarten in that case. We would gain a few hundred dollars potentially if that happens, which would be a bonus.
   5. Dragon Flight tuition is awesome. We’re bumping that up a bit to be more consistent. It averages right around $25,000/month (school year months - 10 months)
   6. We get around $30,000 in interest income for the amount in our account.
   7. We left activity fees at 85%, although it has been decreasing every year. We are going to get more proactive on finding ways for that to come back in, even if it’s from Wayne himself.
   8. Pingree for 5th grade trip is consistent.
   9. Summer camp - There is a slight dip here because we are shortening the summer camp. We can’t clean until summer camp is over.
   10. Sports and Athletics - we’ve captured everything we can for kids to do track, etc.
   11. Chromebook fees
   12. We should see an increase in mill levy. These are based on our enrollment in 2008. If our enrollment takes a hit, we’re ok.
   13. PTO came in with $45,000 this year. Wayne and Jolene had their monthly meeting today. $20,000 hasn’t been asked for from staff for this year, so they’re going to roll it over to next year, so that number will increase to $65,000. They could adjust that based on the Gala. Cary asks if something else could be done with that money? Wayne mentions that they’d talk about that in the expenses. Kumar asks if the number could be increased. Discussion. The amount listed is the amount the PTO promised to us.
   14. Capital Construction is funding that the state gives to charter schools to help for facilities, but it is minimal.
   15. Net increase to revenue around $358,000.
   16. Expenses - Targeting 90% - 95% of SVVSD. They accounted for 93% of the district. Peak to Peak is only at 90%. They added in a Behavior Interventionist position, which he will talk about in a minute. Wayne is passing out a historical salary data sheet so the Board can see what they have spent in salaries and see the change over the years. He mentions a bonus and stipends for when people do amazing work. He says he has been doing that for years, so there are people recognized every year. He is explaining on the numbers on that sheet correspond to the numbers on the budget draft. The actual change in budget is $251,000 from last year to this year. Bob asks what it would be if we went to 95%. Wayne says about another $70-some thousand.
   17. Wayne explains that there is a difference between counselors and Behavior Interventionists. We need someone who really knows how to talk with teachers to build the classroom environment. Katie explains that we really need this help at school because others are being pulled from their tasks that they need to do. It would be a full time job that would pay around $45,000 - $50,000. Katie says that kids are coming in and are not able to manage their emotions. We don’t have anyone on staff that necessarily has that qualification. We need someone on the staff to help the students and help train us on what we need to do and how we can handle this. Wayne says that only the Tier 3 students are getting that special ed service, but other kids are not being served and are outside of what we do. Katie says that trauma informed teaching is really big right now and we need to address it when the kids are young to avoid consequences when they are older. Adams and Douglas Counties are hiring a lot of these types of positions for their school districts. Katie explains that with technological devices, kids are coming in with less social and emotional skills, and we need to deal with that.
   18. Increasing Paid Time Off Hours. Wayne says this will help accommodate substitute teachers time.
   19. Increase in PERA and Health Insurance
   20. Wayne is starting to skim through due to the lack of time.
   21. Wayne says we are sending out a bid for a new custodial contract because we have not been happy with the custodial service.
   22. Liability Insurance, which includes chromebook insurance, our liability and property insurance is going up 52% (!!!) due to all of the natural disasters and the like. In 2017, the pool paid out more claims than the previous four years combined so they depleted their reserves and this is them passing that on to us. Wayne has talked with others to get quotes from new providers and asked about moving around coverages and deductibles. He is working to get that down. Stuart asks if that is expected to go down. Wayne mentions how the hail storms are just decimating properties.
   23. Talk about how some of these categories are combined (for example, the way Dragon Flight field trips are categorized with other things) and Kumar asks if we should break these out. Wayne said the categories are chosen by the CDE so we can’t change those.
   24. The rest of the district services are just slight changes. There may be an increase in Tech because district technology is getting new costs as well.
   25. Everything else is fairly flat.
   26. Furniture and fixtures has a big drop because of all that we did this year.
   27. Stuart asks if there are any large expenses coming up to consider. Carpet will need to be replaced, which we’ll start looking at toward the end of this year. Wayne mentions that there is no space for someone like a Behavioral Interventionists, so we may carve out some space from the art room since there are no longer big installations. However, there would be no HVAC or sprinklers so we would have to spend the money to make accommodations for that. Estimates on that are coming in around $40,000 because of the mechanical aspects of that. Kumar asks about the lawn. Wayne says we’re still dealing with that and we’ll have to see.
   28. We need to submit a budget to the district by April 15th. The budget the Board has to approve isn’t until May. Until we get true PPR, we won’t truly know these numbers. In June, we’ll set PPR, but enrollment won’t be set until October. Leah mentions that the budget is typically amended at the beginning of the next school year. Linda encourages questions now though, if there are any, so that they can be answered now. Wayne wants everyone to know we’re on track for the 90% - 95% to match SVVSD.

IV. Consent Agenda
V. Executive Session
VI. Closing

1. Action Item Review
2. Adjournment


MARIAH CAREY LOVES CHRISTMAS. She loves it with a fanatic’s strict adherence to the laws of Christmas joy. She loves it like no one has ever loved Christmas before. (Did you have an actual reindeer at your holiday festivities last year? Did you hang out with Santa? Didn’t think so.) Christmas is also a cornerstone of the Carey complex. Frank Sinatra might have made the holiday classically jolly, Sufjan Stevens might have made it indie whiny, and Ariana Grande might have made it horny, but no artist has come to define our commercially driven holiday fantasies more than Carey has with “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Since the song dropped on her 1994 holiday album, it’s made an estimated $60 million-plus in royalties. It’s stayed relevant, thanks to fans, of course; a cover on the 2003 Love Actually soundtrack; an album reissue; an annual “All I Want for Christmas Is You” holiday-concert series that sold out a show at Madison Square Garden last year; an animated film; an Amazon Music mini-doc about the undying meaning of the song; and streams on streams on streams. Last year, it finally hit No. 1 on “The Hot 100” chart, after a record-breaking (for its slowness) 25-year journey. Who cares how long it took? It’s her 19th No. 1 hit-putting her above Elvis and one away from tying the Beatles. Does it matter if you like the song? (Full disclosure: I don’t.) No! It is the omnipresent anthem of holiday happiness. And so this year, this exceptionally s**t year of 2020, Carey, who always wants everyone to have a good Christmas, really thinks everyone should have a good Christmas, and she’s got 15 executives assembled in a Zoom war room at 10 p.m. to make damn sure everyone does. They’ve been going for two hours now, plotting ways to bring the merry and bright, no matter what it takes.
“I will sing with a puppet if it’s incredible,” I hear her say with deadly seriousness, that raspy, built-for-a-torchy-ballad voice floating in from one of many nearby rooms in the house she’s renting for the summer. She goes on to suggest possible puppets, determined to sing only with the best one or none at all.
Carey tippy-toes across the marble floors, carrying the Zoom meeting with her as she hovers in the entryway behind me. She’s in her comfies-black leggings, a black off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, and full makeup-but even dressed down, she’s walking like she’s in six-inch strappy Louboutins (a habit she references in the song “Crybaby”). She mutes her iPad mic to greet me quickly. “Hi! A.D.!” (Everyone in her immediate orbit is reduced to first and last initial. Stories sound like mathematical equations in which M.C. and M.R. meet J.D.) “I’m so sorry this is running late!” She’ll be with me soon, she says. She just has to find a diplomatic way to let these men know something they are suggesting is ugly! She goes back to the call. “It just isn’t giving me Christmas warmth,” she says, delivering her criticism as delicately as one of her famous vocal trills.
Carey is running 30-well, 45-okay, we’re going to be real with you: We don’t know how many-minutes late. This is what we expect of her, no? The Diva who bathes in milk and will only be photographed from the right side. We think of these indulgences as readily as her vertiginous notes, or those athletic vocal runs, or her belting “Juust. Liiike. Hoone-aaay,” while she holds her finger to her ear to keep pitch. So it’s hard to be mad at Carey for fully embodying all the various Mariahisms that define her.
Anything less would feel like short shrift, to be honest. Plus she’s a generous diva. She’s dispatched her five-person team, her covid-quarantine pod, to tend to me while I wait. They’d been together since March, without any outsiders, until I was permitted to come tonight (with mask on face and fresh negative covid-test results in hand). The excitement of a newcomer has everyone bustling around like a live-action reenactment of the “Be Our Guest” scene in Beauty and the Beast. “Allison, can I get you wine?” asks her longtime tour manager Michael, as he shows me to a couch and lingers to tell me, in his languid, Idris Elba-British accent, about the first time he met Mariah, decades ago, as she was glamorously coming off a Concorde. “Allison, it would be more comfortable if you sit in here-the lighting is better,” says Ellen, her longtime house manager. “Allison,” Kristofer, her Ken-doll-handsome makeup artist, calls out to me as I’m walking from one great couch to an upgraded one, “I’m making fresh shortbread. Would you like it with jam or powdered sugar?” Her ex-backup dancer and current boo, Bryan Tanaka, smiles at me, doing his part by just being charming. Ellen fluffs a pillow, pours a glass of wine and a glass of room-temperature water, and puts them down in front of the seat Carey will eventually occupy. I am left to sit in a luxurious beige-toned room that smells lightly of vanilla and gardenias- exactly like my rich childhood friend’s suburban home.
The house is still daytime bustling even though it’s now edging on 11:30 p.m., which, according to Mariah Carey Standard Time, is the middle of the day, not the end. Carey is a self-proclaimed vampyyyyra. She loves a sunset, loves a sunrise, and would prefer to exist exclusively in those shadowy hours in between. (She has a sun allergy, she insists.) Her time zone has other quirks: True Love only occurs in summer, underneath the stars. Winter is always joyous. Any day has the potential to be Christmas. And she is eternally 12 years old, as she has been saying since at least 2008, which explains the recurring themes of butterflies, Christmases, dol-phins-epic, song-worthy romantic fantasies. It’s in direct opposition to the other version of extreme femininity she likes to play with, that of the diva in heels on the stair-stepper. Neither persona fully explains how effortlessly she can command a platoon of professionals to execute her vision until you consider that this dualism may be her secret to career control. One cannot be dismissed if one demands what one needs operatically. One cannot be told what is or is not age-appropriate if one doesn’t acknowledge age.
Anyway, the whole 12 thing-it’s sort of a joke and it’s sort of not. Carey turned 50 in March, and Moroccan and Monroe-a.k.a. Roc and Roe, a.k.a. Dem-Kids-her 9-year-old twins with ex-husband Nick Cannon, presented her with a cake with an enormous 12 candle, complicit in her continued crusade against getting older. One milestone is colliding with another. This year marks both half a century of existence and her 30th year in this business-30 years since her first album, Mariah Carey, came out. In those three decades, she’s produced 15 studio albums, been nominated for 34 Grammys (and only won five-don’t get her started), and done everything a star can do (an HSN jewelry line, a Champagne brand, world tours, a reality show, a Vegas residency, an American Idol judging stint). This year, she’s been taking something of a victory lap with a celebration she’s calling MC30, opening the vaults on neverbefore-seen video footage and an album of unreleased songs and demos called The Rarities, and she’s finally put all that legendary shade to paper with a memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. She’s still ignoring her age, but she’s at least letting herself acknowledge the passing of time.
She’s been teasing this memoir for more than a year, mentioning it at a “Genius Q&A” during the press tour for her last album, Caution, but thinking about it for ten. It’s 300-plus meaning-packed pages, and, yes, what she didn’t include has meaning too. Eminem, who was reportedly “stressed” over what Carey might say about their rumored 2001 fling, doesn’t have to worry. “There’s some songs that I can sing in response to that, but I will not do it,” she’ll say when I ask. And then, with a roll of her head: “If somebody or something didn’t pertain to the actual meaning of Mariah Carey, as is the title, then they aren’t in the book.”
What’s in the book is “for the fans” (of course) but mostly for herself, or at least a version of herself. It’s her turn now to “emancipate that scared little girl,” she says. It’s why she spent two years telling stories to her co-writer, Michaela angela Davis, turning the famed Moroccan Room in her Tribeca penthouse into an emotional vomitorium, in hopes that finally, after a career of people misinterpreting her, she can make it all clear. In a way, though, the story she tells in the memoir is the story she’s been telling herself, her fans, her critics-everyone-over and over again for years. And after 30 years of telling these stories, in different ways, you have to wonder why she still feels so misunderstood.
HIT IT, TANAKA!” yells Roe, getting into position as Ellen and Kristofer pull open the French doors leading to the terrace overlooking the pool. Carey strolls out to where Roc and Roe are waiting to surprise her. The conference Zoom is over, but there’s one more thing to attend to before we can sit down.
Carey’s latest single, “Save the Day,” dropped just a few minutes ago, at midnight, and the twins want to celebrate. The opening violins of the song swell over the outdoor stereo system, and they launch into choreography they’ve spent all day perfecting. The song is a long-delayed collaboration with Ms. Lauryn Hill they conceived of in 2011. They decided to release it now, since its message about the importance of coming together to fix the world felt relevant with national Black Lives Matter protests and the lead-up to the election. “It’s very auspicious,” she says, musing that it would have been the perfect song to play during the Democratic National Convention.
Roe executes a string of cartwheels while Carey looks on, hands raised to her face in beatific surprise, and Tanaka captures the moment on two iPhone cameras on tripods with lighting rigged. Rocky hits every dance currently popular on TikTok.
Rocky loves TikTok, but Carey thinks he’s too young to be on it. Recently, she had to put him on a “time-out” after he made a video asking his mom to say hi to “his fan.” Carey can be heard off-camera saying, “I’m on a business call,” and Rocky turns back to the camera and says, “My mom is not ready to be shot on TikTok,” sticks his tongue out, and blows a raspberry in disappointment.
“Okay, I was really on a business call,” Carey says, mildly annoyed at the whole situation. People assumed she just declined because she wasn’t wearing makeup. Plus she wasn’t the one who set up the account for him. “Co-parenting,” she says, then sings, “‘Yeah, it ain’t easy, baby. It ain’t easy.’ But you know what? It’s important. We keep it good for them,” she says of Cannon, whom she divorced in 2014. She won’t comment on his recent career drama (he was fired from his longtime gig hosting Wild ‘N Out for making anti-Semitic remarks on his podcast, Cannon’s Class) but speaks fondly of him in her memoir in the chapter called “Dem Babies.”
The performance ends. Carey runs to them, arms wide open, tears in her eyes, cooing over how lovely everything is-the dance, the sunflowers, the sign. She brings them in for a hug and photo op, but before the shutter can snap, Roe moves away too fast, ensnaring Carey’s large diamond butterfly ring in her hair. “Roe, wait, I’m tangled,” she screams, while Rocky emits a loud belch and giggles.
Carey says good night to the twins. It’s an atmospherically nice night, and she decides she wants to go outside to talk. “It’s better, right?” she says as we sit down at a long wooden table next to the violin-shaped pool (a Stradivarius, with a six-foot koi pond as the bow). Her people are again bustling, setting up the table for us, slipping out of the shadows, putting down drinks and candles, moving the whole setup outside.
“Ellen, will you make us some ‘horse devoirs,’” Carey asks, intentionally mispronouncing the word. “That’s what we call ’em.” “Are you cold, Mariah?” asks Kristofer, who exits to grab her a little throw. “Are you guys warm enough?” asks Ellen, who enters to put down snacks. More candles are placed around us. “Oh, darling. Don’t put that down there for me, because that is hideous,” exclaims Carey. “That is underlighting!” The candle is whisked away. Carey asks Ellen if she wouldn’t mind taking Chacha, her emotional-support dog, to her bedroom, so that she’s there waiting when Mariah finally slips off to sleep sometime after the sun comes up.
Finally, wine poured, throw draped, candles arranged to ensure we both look cinematically beautiful, horse devoirs on the way, she settles back and gazes out over the property, watching the fiber-optic pool lights dance through the rainbow and back again. She’s a little tired, she apologizes, and already a little emotional.
“Can you believe I’m back here?” she says, sighing. “Here” is an upstate rich-person’s enclave not far from where Martha Stewart is thirst-trapping with her chickens. Carey hasn’t spent time in this town since what she refers to as “the Sing Sing days”-when, in the mid-1990s, she shared an over $20 million compound with her toxic first husband, the former Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola. Mottola discovered and signed Carey when she was 19. They married in 1993, when she was 23 and he was 43. Carey has repeatedly described the marriage as controlling. She felt like “a prisoner.”
Mottola and Carey split in 1996, but she still gets that clenched feeling in her gut whenever she talks about him. With a wave of her hand: “I say it all in the book. I’d rather people read it that way.” She takes a long sip from a big goblet of red wine. “And by the way, I forgot a lot of that stuff when I was writing the book. And then recently, people that were friends of his from childhood were like, ‘I hope she told the real story.’”
It’s not a new story in its particulars-it’s been alluded to in tabloids and interviews for decades by both Carey and Mottola. Even its emotional contours were out there already, in her own words, mostly in song lyrics. She’s made a habit of putting her stories-her past lovers, secret enemies, petty grievances, and big traumas-in her songs since she started writing them at 13. (And she does, may she remind us, write her own songs. That’s another thing she’s spent a lifetime reminding everyone-see the two-minute supercut of her saying “As a songwriter”-though she was only just inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame this year, a decade after she became eligible.)
“Honestly, if you look at the words to ‘I Wish You Well,’ it tells you a lot of things about different people in my life. It starts with ‘This goes out to you and you and you/Know who you are,’” she breaks into a half-sing. “And there’s a lot of different people referenced in that from my point of view as a songwriter.”
“And then, background vocals,” she says, indicating when the singers would have kicked in with the phrase “Can’t believe I still need to protect myself from you.” “And then back to the main verse: ‘But you can’t manipulate me like before.’” She’s speaking, but rhythmically; her fingers are waggling up and down near her ear like they do when she sings. She pauses. “It’s like I’ve been telling this story if someone cared to look deep enough. I just feel like there’s no way anybody could have known the complexities and the layered situation that is my life.”
Though her fans, her Lambily, as they call themselves (a combination of family and Lamb, as Carey sometimes refers to her loved ones), have usually paid close enough attention to know the significance of the songs that mean the most to Mariah. Even if she may have never come out and confirmed which lyric is about which incident or relationship, they have their theories. While my friend who is a Lamb Supreme has always suspected it, I, a solid Mariah fan who can sing at least ten of her songs without missing a word, was surprised to learn from the book that “My All” was not just about the general thrall of a new love so exciting you’d do anything to bone but about Carey and her brief fling with Derek Jeter.
The knowledge that this stuff is “already out there” made it easier for Carey to write the memoir. It removed the burden of dropping bombshells (though there are some) and instead lets her just confirm, contextualize, and detail things from her POV-like how she and Jeter met at a dinner party and started text-flirting, secretly, while she was at the end of her marriage to Mottola. Knowing that fans already suspected the song “The Roof” was about her first meeting with him made it easier for her to reveal what she wore the night they had a clandestine kiss on the roof (get it?) of his apartment building. There was Moët. She wore a buttery leather Chanel skirt. She remembers her boots and the rain and her hair curling in stunning detail.
“Of course I do! I can never forget that moment,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like it was some intensely deep, intellectually stimulating-again, it was a great moment, and it happened in a divine way because it helped me get past living there, in Sing Sing, under those rules and regulations.” When she belts, “I’d risk my life to feeeeyall / Your body next to mine,” in “My All,” it’s because she really was risking her life to have a night with Jeter in Puerto Rico, she says.
Her anxiety around Mottola sits just under the surface. She writes candidly about the security cameras she says were always watching her and the security team she felt was reporting her every move. “He was like this oppressive humidity,” she says. She could never escape. She could never talk about it, even if she was, in her own way, always talking about it. When she first discussed Mottola during a Zoom call we had the week before, she started to cry: “It ignites the triangle in my stomach.”
In his own memoir, Hitmaker: The Man and His Music, from 2013, Mottola denied being restrictive or controlling but deemed their involvement “wrong and inappropriate,” by way of apology, and takes credit for his part in her early success. Carey suspects he tried to sabotage her career after they divorced. More than suspects, she says, referencing a 2017 interview on Desus & Mero in which Murder Inc. co-founder Irv Gotti confirmed Mottola boosted a J.Lo and Ja Rule duet to mess with Carey. “It’s out there,” she says. She also knows he might be angered by her perspective, though she hopes he’s not. “I could have gone harder,” she says, suggesting she could have painted him as a monster. “And I didn’t. I give him credit where credit is due.”
So picking this same upstate enclave for her self-quarantine palace does seem inconceivable, but the kids needed space. “Not that the apartment wasn’t spacious,” she explains. (We know; we all saw it on Cribs in 2002.) Providing this for her children is just one way she ensures that they have a better life than she did. “They’re not running around with matted locks,” she says when asked how her own childhood has shaped how she parents. “They know that I’m here for them. They know that if they want to talk with their father, he’s a phone call away,” she goes on. “They have stability. That’s what I didn’t have. They will never have a holiday that’s not happy unless something I can’t do anything about happens. They understand that they are Black. They have a whole lot of self-esteem and self-worth that I never had. And I probably still don’t now. I know that I still don’t.”
She sighs deeply. She’s been up all day-like actual day. So tonight, with the wine and the eerily quiet country night, her 1 a.m. feels like everyone else’s: a time when the existential takes hold and won’t let go.
“But maybe one day I’ll feel equal to the rest of the human race. I didn’t even think I was worthy of happiness and success. I thought I wasn’t allowed to be that person that would have that.” She gestures again to the pool, the property, the basketball courts, the baseball diamond (“not a big one”). “Like, sitting here, looking at this? And after describing the shack?”
The shack is what she calls her childhood home on Long Island, a run-down house at the end of a nice block that she’s still embarrassed by. It’s easy to assume that her dogged adherence to the age of 12 stems from its being a simpler time, that there is something happy to relive there, but that’s not quite right. “I always say, ‘I’m only 12, yay!’ But when you see how many times I talk about ‘I was 12, and this happened,’ it’s clear I went through a lot of stuff as a kid.”
Carey grew up, as she tells it, poor, mixed race, in an all-white neighborhood that made her feel her mixed race-ness, where she was not white enough “but not Black enough to scare people into not saying stuff around me.” Her father, Alfred Roy, was a Black engineer from Harlem, and her mother, Patricia, an Irish American opera singer from Illinois who was disowned by her family for having his children, separated before she was 3. She lived with her mother and only saw her father on the weekends she’d go to visit him and eat his special linguine e vongole. One of the good memories. She never felt like her home situation was stable. She was always aware of tension between her parents and between her parents and her siblings. School wasn’t much better. In the book, she catalogues the racial slights she suffered at the hands of white children.
She writes about her childhood as the thing she had to overcome to become Mariah Carey. And because our traumas are like pothos plants, easily propagated from the clippings of the original, her parents’ trauma (her father’s of existing as a Black man in America; her mother’s of familial rejection for marrying a Black man and a career that didn’t come to fruition) became hers to overcome as well. As did the difficult upbringings of her older brother, Morgan, and her older sister, Alison, whom she now refers to as her “ex-brother” and “ex-sister.” Carey writes about witnessing Morgan’s volatility and fights with her mother. She discusses how she longed to have a real big-sisterly relationship with Alison but instead ended up in dangerous situations, sometimes with men, whenever she got too close. (Her nickname for me, A.D.-she asked to call me that, she told me, because she’s so estranged from her sister she doesn’t like to say Allison.)
“Alison and Morgan both believed I had it easier than they did,” she writes. She hasn’t spoken to Alison since 1994, though she maintains a relationship with the son Alison had at 15. Mostly, Carey constantly worries that they’ll go to the tabloids again, as she says they have done in the past. She doesn’t want them to see her as an “ATM machine with a wig,” she says. (Recently, Alison has made headlines for accusing their mother in a court filing of forcing her into sexual acts and satanic rituals as a child.)
“Here’s the thing: They have been ruthlessly just heartless in terms of dealing with me as a human being for most of my life. I never would have spoken about my family at all had they not done it first.” Even still, you have to wonder how Alison will feel if she picks up the memoir of her estranged superstar sibling and reads how her sister learned a hard lesson about what self-worth should be during the baby shower for her teen pregnancy.
I ask Carey if there is any chance of reconciliation with her ex-siblings in the future. “I have forgiveness in my heart,” she says, “and so I forgive them, but I am not trying to invite anybody to come hang out over here. I think they’re very broken, and I feel sad for them.”
Though she writes as candidly about her mother as she does about her siblings-their confrontations and competitions-she finds it harder to separate herself from the woman who discovered she could sing. (When Carey was barely 3, she sang along with her mother while she was rehearsing a song from Verdi’s Rigoletto, so the legend starts.) Carey still takes care of her, financially, “and always will.” She is one of the book’s dedicatees. “I tried to make her feel like I really do think she did the best she could,” she says and picks up her glass to cheers me.
“I cried writing a lot of parts of this book. Maybe it’s because I have such vivid recollections. You know what? I’m sure I’m going to have to deal with a lot of people being upset with me. I hope not.”
OF ALL THE KNOTS she’s eternally trying to unravel, there is one that, she feels, has refused to come loose easily: “I really have been like, ‘I’m mixed. I’m mixed. I’m really, really mixed,’” Carey sings at me, turning her lifelong repetition into a little ditty. “Like, whatever. Not to make a song out of it. That’s what we do.” This, according to Carey, is her most famous refrain, the one where she explains that she is biracial over and over again.
She already, actually, did make a song of it: “Outside,” from 1997’s Butterfly. She quotes it often in life and in the book (and will sing it on the Audible recording). And now she sings the lyrics to me: “Standing alone/Eager to just believe it’s good enough to be what/You really are/But in your heart/Uncertainty forever lies/And you’ll always be/Somewhere on the/Outside.”
When she cites feelings of alienation or shame, it’s often at the hands of white people. She writes about an incident where she was invited over to a friend’s house in the Hamptons, only to arrive and be called the N-word. It’s the Black women in her life who held her up when nobody else did. Her Nana Reese (her great-aunt on her father’s side) provided some stability. Her “aunties” were the ones who tried to help her learn how to do her hair. Da Brat once helped her escape Sing Sing to go get fries from Burger King. She dedicated a whole chapter to her Cousin LaVinia (“Vinny”), who was one of her closest friends. LaVinia recently died, but it’s her estimation of Carey’s struggles that most shaped her understanding of her mixed-race identity. “It’s like Vinny always said: ‘You kids had all the burdens of being Black but none of the benefits.’”
Before Davis and Carey turned in a draft of The Meaning of Mariah, Davis sent an email to her editor. “I was like, I have to put this on record that all the conversation around race and particularly the view of white people is all Mariah,” Davis says over the phone. They had a nickname for her when she got in this mode: “Militant Riah.” “There were a couple of times that she was like, ‘You’re being too careful. They hated me. I would never be good enough for some white people.’”
And yet, when she first debuted as an artist, a number of reviews misidentified her heritage. In 1990, a Los Angeles Times writer called her a “white singer who has a black vocal style.” Nelson George, a Black critic writing for Playboy, called her “a white girl who can sing,” while another accused her of being marketed as a “white Whitney Houston.” Carey says she can’t speak to the intentionality behind her marketing at the time-“I was 19, what did I know?” In her book, she references how her label sometimes “scrubbed” her music of its “urban inflections.” She recalls recording the “Fantasy” remix with ODB in 1995 and playing it for Mot-tola. “The fk is that?” he said. “I can do that. Get the fk outta here with that.”
Carey would eventually cease to be considered solely pop, becoming more of a crossover pop-hip-hop-R&B fixture. Even still, she’s spent a significant portion of her post-Mottola era defending her biracial identity. After Carey released the hip-hopheavy album Butterfly, comedian Sandra Bernhard made a series of racist jokes during her stand-up special about the way Carey was “acting [N-word-ish] … with Puff Daddy,” suggesting that the white-perceived Carey was all of a sudden acting “Black.” At the time, Carey commented, “If I was two shades darker, there’d have been people protesting for me.” (She ended up writing the NAACP, and the special was taken off the air.) The commentary didn’t stop in the 2000s. Even as recently as 2008, her race was being written about weirdly, e.g., when Jody Rosen sniped about her “racial ambiguity [being] mildly interesting” while trying to determine if she was a captivating pop star or just a good singer. (He decided on the latter.) But “Vision of Love,” she reminds me, went to No. 1 on the R&B charts first. And she performed it live for the first time on The Arsenio Hall Show. “Someone knew they were introducing me as a Black girl.”
In the 1990s, being a “white artist” or a “Black artist” often created deeply divergent music careers. White meant pop, Black meant hiphop or R&B, and within those silos, there were separate charts, audiences, magazine covers, award recognition, and dress codes, and to seek one audience meant potentially alienating the other. As Carey was building her career, there was very little room for crossover, and there wasn’t a lot of understanding afforded to those who didn’t really fit in the boxes. If you were acceptable to white audiences as a pop star, as Houston was, you ran the risk of alienating Black audiences and vice versa. It’s what Lena Horne called being the “kind of Black that white people could accept”: Carey, because of her light skin, and Houston, because of the way she spoke (softly, like a newscaster). The 2017 Whitney Houston documentary, Whitney: Can I Be Me, revisits the moment in 1989 when Houston performed at the Soul Train Awards and the crowd booed and called her “Whitey.” It’s only recently that we’ve begun to more fully acknowledge how damaging and destabilizing the label of “not Black enough” can be.
Davis and Carey met in 2005 at an early-listening event for The Emancipation of Mimi, one of Carey’s comeback albums. Four years earlier, Carey had suffered her first major flop with the movie Glitter. She’d been dropped by EMI a year after it signed her to one of those historic colossally big deals (reportedly, $100 million for five albums). She had a public breakdown and was hospitalized for exhaustion after she made an erratic appearance on TRL. (In the memoir, she reminds us that, despite all that, the song “Loverboy” from Glitter ended up being the best-selling single of 2001. “I’m real,” she mic-drops.)
The Emancipation of Mimi was a reassertion of Carey as an artist, her opportunity to set the tone for the next phase of her career, one she wanted to be centered around her Blackness, and she wanted to do that with a cover story for Essence. “It was very strategic that she started with Black women,” Davis says. At the time, Davis was an editor at the magazine. “Black women have always grounded her in truth,” she says.
Essence had never had Carey on the cover before. Previous editors-in-chief had passed “because, they literally said, ‘Mariah Carey has never said she was Black,’” recounts Davis. The writer, Joan Morgan, brought in evidence: stacks of clippings and transcripts where Carey said “I’m Black” or “My father is Black.” In the end, Davis won. They ran an article in which Carey discussed, similarly to now, what people didn’t know about her struggles with her racial identity. At the end, the article declared her “a grown ass Black woman.” The cover line read: “America’s Most Misunderstood Black Woman.” That was 15 years ago.
From a musical perspective, at least, many of the issues Carey faced early in her career feel less intense now. Hip-hop culture is pop culture. And thanks to Mariah Carey’s 1997 album Butterfly, the once-novel idea of a pop-hip-hop crossover-what her friend and collaborator Jermaine Dupri calls hip-pop-is essentially just what a new song by any artist sounds like.
It’s worth considering whether she would have been as big of a pop star if she had originally been marketed as a Black artist. Would she have been able to collaborate with ODB and the long roster of hiphop artists and producers she favored, and to see those songs become megahits, if her proximity to whiteness hadn’t made it all seem “non-threatening” to white audiences?
“The truth is I will never say I had the same experience as a darker-skinned woman,” Carey starts in. She acknowledges the privilege in her being accepted by white audiences and a white-run music industry, but to her, it also means “having a white mother, and being forced to live in white neighborhoods, and feeling ashamed that there is nobody visibly Black there … and I’m being so real right now that I want to edit myself,” she pauses.
“Believe you me, I’m not thrilled to be this skin tone all the time.” Then she launches into the questions she has asked herself her whole life and maybe continues to ask: “How was I supposed to fit in? I was, like, the only one that’s this weird mutant, mutt-using an antiquated phrase that I’m not asking anyone else to ever use again, but I’m embracing it- mulatto girl. I’m not even embracing it. It’s a horrible way of defining somebody. It actually means ‘mule.’”
Whatever it did for her career, she says, it also “distanced me from the comfort of support and protection from some Black people. Which is an even deeper kind of a pain, pile of pain, if that makes sense. It’s been a lot.”
IF THERE’S ONE THING that makes I Carey nervous about the release of this book into the world, besides some content that is going to “surprise even her best friends,” it’s that people will misconstrue why she’s talking about a lot of this stuff now. She has wanted to write the memoir for a decade, she says. “Whether or not it suddenly became okay to deal with stuff, this book was coming out anyway.” She doesn’t want to seem like she’s capitalizing on the moment.
But the current moment does seem to keep giving new context for her experiences. For example, the conversation surrounding Ellen DeGeneres’s reportedly toxic workplace behavior led to a clip of an interview with Carey resurfacing on Twitter. It’s from 2008, when there were rumors Carey was pregnant. DeGeneres, apparently determined to get Carey to confirm the speculation, challenged her to drink Champagne. Carey was forced to announce her pregnancy. She miscarried soon after. “I was extremely uncomfortable with that moment is all I can say. And I really have had a hard time grappling with the aftermath,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to tell anyone because I had had a miscarriage. I don’t want to throw anyone that’s already being thrown under any proverbial bus, but I didn’t enjoy that moment.” Carey goes on to say that there is “an empathy that can be applied to those moments that I would have liked to have been implemented. But what am I supposed to do? It’s like, [sings] ‘What are you going to do?’”
Her fans have also helped her reexamine her past. In 2018, a Lamb-led campaign, #JusticeForGlitter, turned her former career low into a cult classic and earned the soundtrack a place on the charts for a little while. The movie did come out the week after 9/11; it never truly got a fair shake. With the help of her Lambs, and a Change.org petition demanding that streaming services finally offer it, the album reached No. 1 on iTunes. That same year, Carey was on the cover of People, revealing her battle with bipolar disorder for the first time. It seemed to explain what happened during Glitter, when she went on TRL, but she chose not to elaborate further in the book. “Because I don’t feel like there’s a mental-illness discussion to be had,” she says when I ask. “It is not to deny that. I am not denying that. I just don’t know that I believe in any one diagnosis for a situation or a human being.”
For her, the real story of Glitter, which she tells in great detail for the first time, was the story of her working too hard, of succumbing to the exhaustion of sleep deprivation, and of her family betraying her. (Her mother called the police on her when she was acting erratically, and her brother was the one to check her into a recovery facility, she writes.) That’s perhaps the biggest benefit of this memoir to her: “Now, if people have questions, I can be like, ‘Please refer to chapter x,’ rather than me having to stick up for myself, protect myself, defend myself. Because we can all be wounded, but are we going to sit around licking our wounds forever?”
IT’S NEARING 4 A.M., and she could I talk more, but she desperately needs to use “the loo.” She slips away while her team comes out, partly to keep me company and partly to signal it’s time for me to wrap it up.
The first time we talked, Carey mentioned that it was a bit lonely realizing that she was the only one of her peers who lived to write her own story. Whitney’s gone. Prince is gone. There’s some pressure that comes with that: What story are you willing to tell about yourself, and what are you willing to accept? Carey has finally shaped her story the way she sees it: one of herself as a perpetual underdog who has risen, fallen, and climbed back as dexterously as her famed melismas. It’s the narrative that has propulsed her to greatness; it’s also her mental loop.
Carey comes back from the bathroom and, it turns out, a costume change. She’s swapped her peasant blouse for a black satin kimono robe. It’s humid, her hair has fallen flat, and her laugh is mingling with the chirping cicadas that have emerged. Sunrise is closer than sunset, and it’s starting to feel loose, like the last hour at the club, right before the lights come up, as the DJ tries to find the perfect song to send you off.
Tanaka slips his hand into hers and murmurs that the pasta aglio e olio he has made her is ready. Her emotional-support dog is waiting in bed for her. Her two kids are upstairs, happy but maybe only pretending to be asleep.
Despite how legends want to be seen, this is probably how we most want to see them. As living proof that a life of ups and downs and hard work and too much work ends with you rich as f**k, sitting next to a violin-shaped pool with the family you’ve created to supplant the one you had to endure.
Michael is recounting a story of the time a group of Bloods came up to Mariah backstage at the Source Awards and he was worried. “Oh, I’m good at diffusing tense situations because of my childhood,” she says. Everyone was scared, but they just wanted to take pictures with her on their disposable camera, no big deal. Despite urging me to leave, he pulls up a chair, and they start swapping memories.
“Oh, remember,” Carey says, lurching into another tale, “Jay [as in Z] has that great story of when we were all there together at the club and Prince was taking so long to perform? Whatever, it’s a long story, but he didn’t go on until like 5 a.m. with Chaka Khan, who was having Hennessy and smoking and still singing like a trumpet, and it was amazing. It was amazing.”
Not everyone was there, but everyone agrees it was amazing.
“By the way, this should have been in the book,” she says.
Yes, everyone agrees, it should have been in the book. There was a lot that could have been in the book.
“There’s so much more dragging that could have been done,” she says. “I really didn’t say everything,” she adds with a smile, leaving us hoping, again, for another piece of the story.
Source: Hejira (UK mix)

Countdown to Kickoff 2020: Portland Timbers

Basic Info:

Club Name: Portland Timbers
Location: Portland, Oregon
Stadium: Providence Park. Beautiful timelapse of the recent renovations.
Head Coach: Giovanni Savarese (3rd year)
Captain: Diego Valeri
CEO/Majority Owner: Merritt Paulson
USL Affiliate: Timbers 2
Kits:

• Primary: 2019 Home Release
  
• Secondary: 2020 Away Release
  

2019 in Review

Final Standings: 14-13-7 (W-L-D), 49 pts, +3 GD, 6th in the West
In one word, the 2019 Portland Timbers season was draining. It was an endurance test for the players. It was an endurance test for even the most ardent supporters. And it was certainly an endurance test for a Front Office that invested serious capital into organizational infrastructure. Bookended by snowy affairs in the Rocky Mountains, a year filled with tantalizing potential melted away, leaving a passionate (some might say capricious) fanbase searching for explanations. So, what went wrong?
Well, it was always going to be an uphill battle from the opening kick. Starting with the coldest game in MLS history in Colorado, the Timbers faced a daunting 12-match road trip to accommodate the impressive renovations to Providence Park’s East stand. After accumulating 1 pt from the first six matches, including blow out losses to both FC Cincinnati (!) and then-winless San Jose, the fanbase collectively smashed the panic button entering a match against ex-coach Caleb Porter and his Columbus Crew. However, for the next few months, we witnessed a different team and a different mentality. Three consecutive quality victories against Columbus, Toronto, and RSL brought the team back from the abyss. And a subsequent win against upstart Philadelphia saw Portland finish its road marathon at a respectable 14 points.
Suddenly, the narrative flipped. Pundits consistently listed the Timbers at the top of their power rankings, and with 17 of the final 22 matches at one of the best home-field advantages in MLS, it seemed the positive momentum would prevail indefinitely. More importantly though, the Timbers had found their final piece to the puzzle: an elite, ruthless, and fiery DP striker in Brian Fernandez. Fresh off an impressive campaign with Necaxa in Liga MX, the Argentine became the first player in history to score in five consecutive regular-season games to open an MLS career. His clinicality and intensity raised the level of the squad, leading Steve Clark to don the classic Michael Myers mask from Halloween, declaring Providence Park as a “House of Horrors” for the opponent.
But as it turned out, the team never truly reacclimated to the friendly confines of its home pitch. After four months (incl. preseason) away from home, the squad’s lethal counter-attacking style was far more suited for road matches which provided no impetus to play attractive soccer. Away victories at elite opponents including NYCFC, Seattle, and LAFC provided a stark contrast to disheartening home performances against the likes of Colorado, Orlando, and 10-man Chicago. And soon, the atmosphere off-the-field began to match the team’s sudden struggles on the pitch.
Political viewpoints aside, the Iron Front protests and Diego Valeri’s contract impasse ignited an already contentious relationship between the Timbers Army and FO. Meanwhile, as the squad racked up disappointing home results due to uninspired offensive play, home attendance began to waver more so than years past. While the home sell-out streak remains to this day, the increased number of empty seats in Providence Park was a pretty blunt indication of increased apathy towards the organization.
And then, there was the cherry on top. After missing consecutive matches due to a reported “stomach bug,” it became pretty clear Brian Fernandez was not the same player he was in the early summer. With a complicated and somber family history, Fernandez had struggled with substance abuse issues in the past but seemed to be on the path to full recovery during recent years. However, in October, Fernandez entered the league’s Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program, and just as his story arc in green-and-gold faded to black, the Timbers season finished with a whimper. Jefferson Savarino’s 87th-minute goal in snowy Utah knocked the Timbers out of Cup contention. Eleven months following an exciting run to MLS Cup, Portland entered the 2020 offseason weary, drained, and searching for a new beginning.

The Coach

Giovanni Savarese
I expected 2019 to provide more clarity on Giovanni Savarese’s coaching aptitude, but as I sit here one year later, I’m still left with more questions than answers. Gio’s passion and fervor was a refreshing juxtaposition to Caleb Porter’s often smug demeanor, but his far more conservative style still ruffles the feathers of fans who yearn for the days of “Porterball.” While Savarese implemented a high-pressing, dynamic, and open style during his time at the Cosmos, he has yet to find similar success doing so in the Rose City. The past two seasons have exhibited nearly the same progression: start the season trying to play pressing-style soccer, get beat badly, and then resort to a conservative, counter-attacking approach.
The truth of the matter is the conservative style fits the Portland Timbers. When the defense is solid, Diego Valeri and Sebastian Blanco are talented enough to win the game on the counter by themselves. However, this tactical inflexibility is essentially the sole on-field contributor for why the team struggled so mightily down the stretch. When teams packed it in and eliminated the possibility of counter-attacks, Portland could not break down the opposition, resorted to launching an MLS record number of crosses, and got scorched on counters going the other way. A taste of their own medicine if you will.
In 2020, Savarese has no excuse. There’s no road trip to start the season, he has a loaded arsenal of complimentary attacking weapons, and now it’s abundantly clear the Timbers must learn how to control games from the front foot. An identity is useful, but flexibility is a requirement to be great. The club wants to (has to) win now, and they’ve invested significantly into personnel and infrastructure to do so. Now, it’s up to Savarese to lead the team to silverware.

Departures

Brian Fernandez (ST): This one hurts. There are no two ways about it. Fernandez truly convinced GM Gavin Wilkinson and TD Ned Grabavoy that he was past his struggles, but unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be the case. As Wilkinson stated in The Athletic, “if we could go back and do it again, we wouldn’t have done it,” adding “what I will say is the word fraud exists for a reason.” Rumors suggest Necaxa covered up a failed drug test, and MLS is currently launching a lawsuit to help the club recoup the transfer fee. While Wilkinson suggests Fernandez was a bust, the truth is he scored 15 goals in ~25 games in all comps, showing a ruthlessness in front of goal that rivaled the Martinez’s and Ruidiaz’s of the league. As people who have met him can attest, he’s a vibrant and kind individual regardless of the fact he continues to face difficult obstacles off the field. It's just such a disappointment that it didn’t all come together, and I pray for his health and safety.
Zarek Valentin (RB): This one hurts too. Zarek was a staple of the community, someone who embraced Portland as his home, and was as approachable as any professional athlete. With initiatives like wearing a rainbow ribbon in his hair to fundraise for homeless LGBT+ youth, Zarek was an ideal steward for the club and community. With our lack of fullback depth, leaving him unprotected in the expansion draft was far from a popular decision - one that strained an already frayed relationship between the Front Office and some fans. That said, as amazing as Zarek is, his lack of athleticism was starting to catch up to him. He even admitted some struggles down the stretch, and as more talented/athletic wingers enter the league, his minutes might soon reflect it. Zarek’s versatility, eccentricity, and civic involvement will certainly be missed though. Houston, you’ve got a great dude.
Claude Dielna (CB): The most puzzling move of 2019, it didn’t take an acute observer to recognize that Dielna struggled in MLS. Wilkinson and Grabavoy took a one-year flier on Dielna to be the 4th-stringer, and the outcome was fairly predictable. He possesses a silky left foot which allows him to pick sharp passes out of the back, but he can’t run, can’t jump, and can’t defend 1v1. All of those attributes are pretty essential requirements for playing CB in any league, so it’s no surprise to see the organization not renew his contract. In the end, I wouldn’t suggest Dielna self-immolated like many horrific Timbers CBs of yesteryear (see McKenzie, Raushawn), but I highly doubt anyone will be pining for his return.
Foster Langsdorf (ST): Langsdorf may be used as an example of a Homegrown the Timbers failed to move through the ranks, but letting him go makes sense (unfortunately.) In a 2019 season essential for his development, he failed to make any significant impact at the USL level, and at 24, he would’ve entered the 2020 campaign in the exact spot he did the previous two seasons. Despite some clever finishes in the 2018 USL season, he’s not a legitimate option for the first team in this day in age - especially when similarly-aged strikers Felipe Mora, Jaroslaw Niezgoda, and Jeremy Ebobisse boast far more developed skillsets.
Modou Jadama (CB/RB): Jadama made two total appearances for the first team over two seasons, including one start at RB at Montreal in 2019. To be frank, he didn’t particularly shine as an MLS-caliber player during that time, so his opportunity to cement himself in the organization’s plans came and went. Now at Atlanta United 2, I think he’ll be a good fit for a full-time USL position, although we probably could have used CB depth with Bill Tuiloma’s injury.
Kendall McIntosh (GK): McIntosh was an undersized goalkeeper whose frame and athleticism is reminiscent of the likes of Nick Rimando. For the most part, he was a career T2 netminder that was far too raw in some areas to mount a challenge against experienced keepers like Jeff Attinella and Steve Clark. Now a member of the Red Bulls via the Re-Entry Draft, I doubt McIntosh finds many more minutes outside of the USL, but he seemed like a good dude and we all wish him the best.

2020 Outlook:

So, where does that leave us for the 2020 season? Well, pretty close to the same spot we found ourselves last year. In the preceding two seasons, it was clear the Timbers possessed enough talent to capture silverware, yet surpassing the final hurdle proved to be too much. As a result, continuity in terms of roster management remains among the league’s most stable. Ultimately, Portland took the field March 3 in Colorado with 10 of the 11 starters from MLS Cup the previous December, and this season, the only departure considered a surefire starter was Brian Fernandez.
However, the main difference in 2020 comes down to the acquisitions. The Timbers FO utilized the abnormally long break to load up with an arsenal of talent, providing a stark divergence from the quiet transfer window in 2019. As much as I want to compliment the FO for its hard work this offseason, acquiring fresh blood was essential. Key pieces of the core including Larrys Mabiala, Diego Chara, Sebastian Blanco, and Diego Valeri are all exiting their prime window, and the Timbers must capitalize before that window slams shut. Consequently, four of the five names you’ll see listed in the acquisitions section below were brought in to have an immediate impact and elevate an already talented squad.
As a result, in terms of pure on-paper talent, this is a Top 5 caliber MLS team. Whether Savarese can coalesce that talent into a functioning, dynamic, and successful unit is an entirely different story however. It honestly feels like a boom-or-bust type season, and I’m worried about how they’ll navigate the natural roller-coaster swings that MLS’s parity generates. So, I’ll leave you with this: if the Timbers figure out how to maintain defensive structure without resorting to a conservative shell, they’ll be one of the best teams in the league. If not, all bets are off.

Acquisitions:

Jarosław Niezgoda (ST): The Polish DP doesn’t have to single-handedly replace Brian Fernandez’s goal contributions, but make no mistake about it, the Timbers brought Niezgoda in to make an immediate and profound impact on the scoresheet. At only 24, Jarek arrives with a high pedigree having notched double-digit goals in multiple seasons for one of Poland’s powerhouses in Legia Warsaw. Ultimately, it makes sense European clubs like Bordeaux and Torino were sniffing around the striker, as he’s quite mobile for his size, can finish well with both feet, and is clever with his movements inside the box. And say what you will about the Ekstraklasa, it has a strange knack for producing efficient goalscorers, including Niezgoda’s Legia predecessor Nemanja Nikolic.
However, there is a massive catch: Niezgoda has struggled with injuries throughout his career. In a league famous for physical play, and on a team that has experienced its fair share of injury-riddled seasons, Jarek’s fitness is a legitimate concern. While his congenital heart issues seem to be held in check, Legia fans are quick to mention “he's made of glass, and it's hard to keep him in shape for the whole season.” The Timbers’ physio staff will have their work cut out for them to keep Niezgoda on the pitch and scoring goals.
Note: Niezgoda has yet to feature in preseason due to the recovery timeline from a heart ablation procedure during his medical. We likely won’t see him in the XI for the first few weeks of 2020.
Felipe Mora (ST): Niezgoda’s injury-checkered past is an important factor for why Mora’s arrival is such a critical addition. The 26-year-old Chilean seemingly fell into the Timbers lap in a series of fortuitous circumstances, as they acquired him on a TAM loan deal from Pumas in Liga MX. Normally, Mora would be a DP caliber acquisition, and in fact, he was considered a serious target for the final DP slot last year before the club opted for Fernandez. However, after falling out of favor, Pumas were willing to let him go in a manner that accommodated Portland’s limited remaining budget space. Mora provides a divergent style from Niezgoda’s channel-running and Ebobisse’s hold-up ability. He operates on a true poacher’s instinct, and his industrious approach will provide a complementary presence to any of the other strikers.
Dario Župarić (CB): If there’s one offseason acquisition that is more critical to the team's success than the others, Dario Župarić is that guy. Throughout the Timbers MLS history, CB has easily been their most troublesome spot, and they’ve yet to replace Liam Ridgewell’s contributions since his departure last year. Say what you will about Liam’s off-the-field persona: his magnetism, leadership, organizational skills, and distribution were undoubtedly influential to the club’s performance.
Župarić, for lack of a better statement, is essentially the true Ridgewell replacement. At 27-years-old, the Croatian arrives with 90+ matches under his belt at Pescara in Italy and Rijeka in Croatia, a club that has already produced productive MLS players like Héber and Damir Kreilach. Early reports in training regard him as “smooth and confident,” and even if that confidence has gotten the better of him occasionally, those characteristics exemplify why Gio had never received “more messages from friends saying you’ve brought in a very good player.” In the end though, the pressure is on Dario to perform on the pitch. MLS athleticism poses a unique challenge, and there’s little flexibility to compensate for any struggles. His adjustment to MLS must be quick.
Yimmi Chara (RM): Recognize the last name? In a courtship that has lasted as long as the Timbers MLS era itself, Wilkinson finally brought the youngest Chara brother to the Rose City. Acquired as a DP from Atletico Mineiro, there is concern about whether Yimmi’s G+A output will justify the reported $6 million transfer fee. Throughout his career, he’s never been the type of player to light up the scoresheet, but it’s difficult to dispossess him and he provides lightning-quick pace that this roster lacks. With multiple attacking options, I honestly don’t anticipate much pressure to fill the stat sheet, and his familial connection to the organization should facilitate a more seamless transition. Plus, it’s difficult enough for the opposition to face one Chara - it’ll certainly be a pain in the ass to confront two.
Blake Bodily (LM): The HG left-footer is a fairly highly-regarded prospect coming out of the Pac-12, and he showed flashes of quality during his time at T2 a few years ago. With the depth on the wings, I can’t imagine he’ll see much of any first-team minutes. I could be wrong, especially if things go south for any reason, but let’s revisit this signing a year or two from now.

A word on everyone else:

Goalkeepers:
Steve Clark (GK): Without a doubt, Clark was the surprise player of 2019. Boasting the highest save percentage and second-lowest GAA in the league, Clark made numerous highlight-reel saves after taking over for Jeff Attinella in late April. While the occasional mental lapse defined much of his career up to this point, the 33-year-old was nearly flawless in all phases of play last season. However, there’s legitimate concern that this outstanding form is not replicable throughout the next campaign. After Attinella’s regression to the mean following a career year, one can understand why the Front Office might have been apprehensive to give him a sizable pay raise - even if his performances warranted it. That said, Clark’s got the new deal in his pocket and will certainly be the starter opening day vs Minnesota.
Jeff Attinella (GK): As highlighted above, few Timbers had a more ill-fated 2019 campaign than Jeff Attinella. After a torrid 2018 season, Attinella’s performances were marred by poor decision after poor decision until his year concluded with season-ending shoulder surgery. You have to feel for the guy too, as for the first time in his career, he entered an MLS regular season as the unquestioned starter. We’ll see how he recovers from the shoulder injury, but if Clark’s consistency remains and Aljaž Ivačič shows promise, I wouldn’t be shocked if the Timbers move him while he still has some value.
Aljaž Ivačič (GK): If there’s a Timber who had a more disastrous 2019 than Jeff Attinella though, it’s probably Aljaž Ivačič. The 26-year-old Slovenian was acquired last offseason to be the goalkeeper of the future, but a significant leg surgery last February took him out of team activities for most of the year. When he did return with T2 in late summer, things did not look great to say the least. It is undoubtedly difficult to adapt to a new country, but Ivačič’s struggles were worryingly apparent. Most of his goals conceded for T2 looked similar to this, where he was either in the wrong position, extremely hesitant to come off his line, or strikingly late to react to the opponent. These are fundamental issues that can hopefully be chalked up to rust and then addressed with a full preseason. If not, Aljaž might go down as one of the worst signings in club history.
Defenders:
Jorge Moreira (RB): Moreira possesses the talent to be the best RB in the league, but sporadically found himself a liability last season. After years spent with Argentine powerhouse River Plate, the 30-year-old Paraguayan was naturally inclined to push up the pitch since his teams had often dominated the game’s flow. As a result, the Timbers’ conservative style and league’s athleticism caught him off guard, as he had an unfortunate propensity to be out of position early in 2019. However, he mostly adjusted over the course of the year, and his power, crossing ability, and dynamism are crucial to the team.Even with the occasional poor clearance, Moreira is a lockdown starter and few RBs in MLS have his offensive weaponry and pedigree. His loan only lasts until June 30 however, though I’d fully expect the Front Office to lock him down on a permanent deal.
Update: the Timbers right-side defense has been tragic this preseason, and much of that has to do with Moreira’s play. He’ll have to re-adjust or else he’ll revert back to being a liability again
Larrys Mabiala (CB): With his pearly-white smile, cool demeanor, and commanding aerial ability, the big French-Congolese CB is one of the most respected players in the Timbers’ locker room. In a position that is a perennial revolving door of underperforming wreckage, Mabiala has been the one “written-in-ink” starter since mid-2017, and his veteran savvy is integral to the squad’s success. But at age 32, Larrys’ value is not embodied by his individual qualities but more so the partnership he forms with Župarić. His physical presence will always be vital to an otherwise undersized team, however, he lacks the turn of pace and distribution ability that would place him among the elite CBs in MLS. As a result, Larrys and Dario must discover how to paper over each other’s weaknesses by performing to their unique capabilities: Župarić covers ground well and can initiate attacking movements while Mabiala handles physical strikers and cleans up loose balls in the 18. In the end, his consistency will be as influential as any player on the roster. If for any reason he performs below the norm, there is simply not enough quality depth behind him to overcome it.
Bill Tuiloma (CB): Tuiloma is not spectacular by any means, but he’s an ideal player to provide sporadic minutes. The 24-year-old Kiwi is cheap, versatile, and possesses enough technical quality to score the odd banger. It’s a shame a calf injury will rule him out for the next few weeks, as the team could use his flexibility for spot duty at CB, RB, and even defensive midfield. If he recovers fully and Župarić struggles to adapt to the league’s athleticism, expect him to mount a challenge for starting minutes.
Julio Cascante (CB): The Costa Rican CB is best described as a high-ceiling, low-floor player whose ceiling continues to lower year after year. As far as backup CBs go, he’s probably adequate, but the guy went from a fringe national-teamer to virtually off-the-radar since his arrival in Portland. Though his height and build forge a formidable aerial presence, he’s yet to resolve occasional mental lapses and improve his subpar distribution. But Julio’s most maddening characteristic is his inconsistency. Perhaps the best thing you can say about a Cascante performance is that you didn’t notice him. Unfortunately, he tends to stick out for all the wrong reasons. Maybe a little more familiarity with the league will help the 26-year-old raise his level in 2020. I’m not exceedingly hopeful though.
Jorge Villafaña (LB): El Sueño hasn’t been the same player since his departure to Santos Laguna after MLS Cup 2015. Still an excellent crosser, Villafaña really struggled with pacey wingers towards the beginning of the season, although there are some whispers he was often gutting through minor knocks. Even with an uptick of form over the course of the campaign, there is legitimate concern he’s lost a step and will be a liability in the backline. I love the man as much as the next guy, but I’d say the uneasiness is valid. Let’s hope he proves us all wrong.
Marco Farfan (LB): The lack of confidence in Villafaña would be less of an issue if Zarek Valentin were still suiting up in the green-and-gold because Marco Farfan is as fragile as a potato chip. The HG LB is not the most athletic individual, but his technical quality is probably proficient enough to play at this level. Farfan still has to evolve as a 1v1 defender, though he’ll certainly get looks this year if he can manage to stay healthy.
Note: We still need a backup RB. It could be former NYRB, IMFC, and Dynamo player Chris Duvall. 20-year-old Venezuelan Pablo Bonilla is another option, but he’s at T2 for the meantime.
Midfielders:
Diego Valeri (CAM): When all is said and done, I hope MLS fans and media take a moment to appreciate just how good Diego Valeri was. Since 2015, we’ve witnessed impressive names take home the Landon Donovan MVP award including Giovinco, Villa, Josef, and Vela. Sandwiched in between those names you’ll find Diego Valeri. Only the ninth MLS player to reach the elusive 70G, 70A Club, Valeri took the Timbers from a hapless expansion side to a perennial playoff contender. And from my admittedly biased perspective, I don’t think he gets enough credit for doing so. But don’t take it from me, take it from Albert Rusnak, who accurately captures the true essence of the Maestro in this interview. For the miracles performed on the pitch, his importance and presence in the community are just as admirable.
However, times are changing for Valeri, and it’s best exemplified by the fact we almost lost him over a contract dispute this offseason. By taking a TAM deal, Diego not only affirmed his commitment to the organization but allowed them to make moves to best ensure he doesn’t retire with only a single major MLS title to his name. I’d expect the Timbers staff to exercise more load management with him this campaign, but by no means does that change his status as a pillar of the club and community. Build the statue.
Sebastian Blanco (LM/RM): Sebastian Blanco is one of those guys who never seems to score a bad goal. The fiery Argentine may not be the face of the franchise off the pitch, but the decision to extend his DP contract over Valeri is a hint towards Blanco’s importance on the field. After posting his second consecutive double-digit assist campaign, Blanco’s quality across all attacking midfield positions is unquestioned. That said, 2020 is a pivotal season for the Timbers’ oldest Designated Player. Soon to be 32, the clock is ticking on Blanco’s heyday, and he’ll certainly aspire to outperform 2019’s underwhelming tally of six goals from 106 shot attempts. Now surrounded by a wealth of complimentary attacking pieces though, I’d expect a rejuvenated Seba come March. Bet the over on six goals.
Diego Chara (CDM): If there’s anyone who can conquer the inevitability of fathertime, Diego Chara is the guy. Soon to be 34-years-old, Chara’s performance metrics — involving areas such as speed and distance covered — reached all-time highs last year. His importance to the club over the past decade cannot be overstated, and we were all ecstatic to see him finally partake in an MLS All Star Game last season. The Colombian possesses a pillowy first touch, an immense soccer IQ, and a fearless presence in the middle of the park, and there simply will be no replacing him when he finally does choose to retire. But to be honest with you, I think he’s still got a few more Best XI caliber seasons in him. He just ages like a fine wine.
Andrés Flores (CM): Hell, I’m just gonna copy and paste exactly what I wrote last year because it’s still just as applicable. Andres Flores is like a Toyota Camry - solid if unspectacular. He doesn't have the sexy style that will garner all the attention, but when push comes to shove and you need to get from point A to point B, he’ll do the job (at a very low price too!). Look for him to assist in spot-duty once he returns from injury, but his most important contributions will likely be found in the little things off the pitch.
Cristhian Paredes (CM): At only 21 years of age, the full Paraguayan international started over 30 matches the past two seasons and has also emerged as the surefire midfield partner to Diego Chara. After a 2018 campaign that saw a significant adjustment period, Paredes looked far more composed in 2019, adding late-runs into the box into his arsenal midway through last season. However, no longer on loan from Club America, Paredes will face more organizational pressure to be a day-in, day-out starter this campaign. His ranginess and ability to break up play are unquestioned, but he needs to become a bit cleaner on the ball and more confident playing out of tight spaces. That said, there’s a reason the club has invested more capital into the promising midfielder: he has the potential to be a significant contributor for years to come.
Marvin Loría (LM/RM): In the next few seasons, I’d wager Marvin Loría will become the poster child for the Timbers youth development structure. With a comparatively underdeveloped and shallow Homegrown talent pool, Portland picks up guys like Loría out of foreign youth programs to develop through the Timbers pipeline. The 22-year-old Costa Rican international showed significant promise last season, and he can play a true inverted winger role - a unique style in terms of this roster. While he may see time at LM and CAM, I love him cutting in from the right, as he can deliver bangers like this and allow Jorge Moreira to bulldoze forward. At a league minimum salary, Loría provides the cheap and talented depth which makes this attack’s outlook so promising. I can’t wait to see what strides he makes this season (once he returns from an underpublicized/undisclosed injury).
Andy Polo (RM): Not many people in the Timbers fanbase understand why Andy Polo is still on the roster, let alone competing for starting minutes. In 2,860 MLS minutes, the Peruvian winger has only managed a dismal one goal and three assists - a statline that is considerably worse than ineffective wingers of the past including Kalif Alhassan, Sal Zizzo, and Franck Songo’o. He’s not an outright liability, and occasionally puts in a shift defensively, but he essentially exists solely to occupy space. Now entering his third season, Polo’s best string of matches came as the third CM in a 4-3-2-1 just before the 2018 World Cup. He’s since gathered looks in preseason as a #8 in a 4-3-2-1 and showed flashes but is still incomplete. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tomas Conechny (CF/LM/RM): The 21-year-old Argentine enters the 2020 campaign a relative unknown, and though the club thought enough of him to exercise his full-time purchase option from San Lorenzo, his fit on the squad has yet to be fully discerned. Rumored to be one of the better headers-of-the-ball on the team, he showed occasional creative sparks in late-game situational appearances but has yet to prove he deserves starting minutes. We hear quotes akin to “he doesn’t yet know how good he can be,” but it still isn’t obvious that a particular position suits him well or if he even possesses a skillset that allows him to be a difference-maker at this level. For all intents and purposes, he’s likely to end up Diego Valeri’s understudy even if Conechny has yet to show the same precision and danger at a playmaking second-forward role. As a result, it remains to be seen if the high-rated prospect grows into a significant piece of the puzzle or if his lack of positional clarity ultimately hampers his development.
Dairon Asprilla (RM): Dairon Asprilla plays at an all-star caliber level if one of two things are true: the Timbers are on the verge of postseason elimination or he’s playing on T2. If neither of those two things are true, he’s often more useless than a turn signal on a BMW. Some wonder if he possesses compromising pictures of Wilkinson or MP, otherwise there’s very little to explain why he’s one of the longest-tenured Timbers - especially considering he’s been in-and-out of the doghouse almost every year. Word out of training suggests he’s been one of the best players in camp, but we’ve been down this road before - if it’s not Oct. or Nov., Asprilla often looks lost on the pitch.
Sidenote: 99% of Dairon’s shot attempts get thwarted due to his foolishly long windup, but when he does get a hold of one, they stay hit.
Eryk Williamson (CM): The HG midfielder (by way of D.C.) found starting minutes in spot appearances last fall, and he looked competent if unremarkable. For T2, Williamson often occupied more advanced positions, but I think he projects best as a ball-shuttling #8 in this squad. In particular, I can see him fitting into Andy Polo’s old role as a CM next to Chara and/or Paredes in a 4-3-2-1, as his passing and combination play provide a diverse look from the other two. Overall, Williamson finds himself in a decent situation to get game action this year, and I’m interested to see how he develops and grows in confidence in 2020.
Renzo Zambrano (CDM): Another international brought through the T2 pipeline, Zambrano is essentially Diego Chara’s backup at the #6. Since George Fochive left following the 2015 season, the Timbers have struggled to find a suitable defensive backup in the central midfield. Renzo is now that guy. The 25-year-old Venezuelan appeared in 10 matches last season and struggled immensely in fixtures against Colorado and Atlanta, but showed flashes of positivity in thrashings of Houston and Vancouver. 2020 will require more consistency from Zambrano who doesn’t possess the same physicality or power as Chara - but then again, few do. As a result, if I were Savarese, I’d try to mold Zambrano into a fulcrum/anchor type midfielder in the form of a Uri Rosell or Scott Caldwell. He’s a capable passer, and if he simplifies his game to shield the backline, he’ll be an asset to the team. If not, he’ll likely over-extend himself, and his midfield partner will be forced to work more tirelessly to maintain solid defensive shape. Renzo is likely the first option off the bench whenever Chara or Paredes are unavailable, so his growth is critical to the team’s success this year.
Forwards:
Jeremy Ebobisse (ST): Since Niezgoda and Mora’s arrival, some fans and media have denounced the organization for burying the 23-year-old American on the depth chart and hindering his development. Here’s why I think that’s an overly-sensationalized viewpoint:

1. As Wilkinson has correctly identified, Ebobisse will miss a good chunk of the early season for Olympic qualification, and with Niezgoda’s injury history, there needs to be other legitimate options to start upfront (i.e. not Dairon Asprilla).
   
2. In 2018, Ebobisse entered the season ‘stuck’ behind two DP-type strikers in Fanendo Adi and Samuel Armenteros. Guess who emerged on top? Ebobisse. There will be multiple competitions, two-striker formations, and rotations that allow him to earn quality minutes.
   
3. This idea that the organization is almost trying to sabotage his development is an outrageous claim. Ebobisse was the only player on the squad to play in every match last season and only finished behind Chara, Blanco, and Valeri in terms of total minutes played. Granted, he played a fair few matches at LW (not ideal, but he wasn’t outright terrible), but the team did have its best stretch of success with him and Fernandez on the pitch together.
   

But the one factor people must acknowledge is this: Ebobisse still hasn’t developed the it factor that other MLS strikers have - at least not yet. When Fernandez arrived, his ruthlessness was a stark contrast to Ebobisse’s often less-goal-hungry runs and occasional lack of clarity in the final third. Jeremy is a decent finisher, even with a few missed sitters, but he’s still not consistent enough with the direct runs off the shoulder that separate good from great. He’ll hopefully continue to develop a wider range of skills, but he’s not yet the guy to put this team over the top.
Predicted Starting XI:
Primarily: 4-2-3-1
Other likely options: 4-3-2-1 or 4-4-2
Best Case Scenario:
A top playoff seed and a challenge for either the Supporter’s Shield or MLS Cup. Savarese effectively implements tactical flexibility, Niezgoda and Mora combine for 20+ goals, and Cristhian Paredes takes the next step forward in his development. While Župarić locks down the defense, one of Valeri or Blanco mounts a Best XI campaign, and Diego Chara makes a second consecutive All-Star Game appearance. Sprinkle in a Cascadia Cup alongside a harmonious relationship between the Front Office and Timbers Army, and you have a damn successful year.
Worst Case Scenario:
Pretty much the opposite of what you see above. Niezgoda can’t stay healthy while the core pieces’ form collectively falls off a cliff. Those in the Army who hold a personal vendetta against Merritt Paulson blow a trivial issue out of proportion causing a full-on revolt from the supporter’s group. Savarese proves to be an average coach with exploitable flaws, and the team fails to qualify for the playoffs in a competitive Western Conference. Significant spending, no tangible results. A wasted year.
Realistic Scenario:
Well, either of those two scenarios could qualify as realistic. But like all Timbers seasons, it’s most realistic to be somewhere in between. There’ll be stretches of outright panic, and there’ll be other times where we all convince ourselves the Timbers will win MLS Cup. Some of the signings hit: let’s go with Župarić - while other signings underwhelm due to extenuating circumstances: probably Niezgoda (and his glass skeleton). The team finishes in the middle of the pack - a team that no one wants to face in October - but one that is equally liable to beat themselves.
Prediction:
Even for someone as pessimistic as I am, I won’t predict the worst-case scenario. Nevertheless, I can’t shake the discouraging feeling that the Timbers will squander its immense talent again. A disappointing 6th or 7th place finish is in store after another taxing roller-coaster season. However, I’ll go out on a limb to say Portland does win a Cascadia Cup or USOC - some sort of silverware that convinces everybody the obvious flaws can be overcome in 2021. Blanco has a great 2020 season. The other pieces show flashes brilliance, yet can’t quite string together enough consistency to let the attack fire on all cylinders. Savarese will keep his job but enters the 2021 campaign on the hotseat. It’ll be another case of “close, but not close enough.”

Online Resources

Official Links: Website | Twitter
Local Coverage: Oregon Live | Stumptown Footy
Best Twitter follow: Chris Rifer
Best Read: Jamie Goldberg’s article on Fernandez didn’t age well, but it’s extremely important to understand his tragic life story.
Subreddit: timbers

#RCTID

Team: Minnesota Vikings

Division: NFC North
Record: 8-7-1 (3-2-1 vs. Division) (2^nd in NFC North) (Missed Playoffs)

Introduction

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Heading into the 2018 season, Minnesota Vikings fans had every reason to be optimistic about their teams' future. They were a young, hot team coming off of a 13-3 season that included one of the NFL's most memorable plays in recent memory. They had also gone out of their way to grab what they believed to be their "missing piece" in quarterback Kirk Cousins. He would be paired with a young and up-and-coming offensive mind: Philadelphia Eagles quarterbacks coach John DeFilippo.
If that weren't enough, the Vikings then proceeded to bolster their already-dominant defense with the signing of former Defensive Rookie of the Year Sheldon Richardson and selected cornerback Mike Hughes in the first round of the NFL Draft. Star defenders Eric Kendricks and Danielle Hunter were also handed lucrative multi-year extensions.
From top to bottom, the Vikings were locked and loaded for another postseason run. With all of these additions to a team that was already one game away from a Super Bowl, there's no way the Vikings were going to miss the playoffs, right? Right???
Wrong. Despite having a winning record, the 2018 season was somewhat of a squandered opportunity for Minnesota. Although they had plenty of talent on both sides of the football, the Vikings never seemed to reach their full potential.
In the following piece, I, along with other members of the Vikings community, will be taking a look back on the 2018 season, and how the team can get back to their 2017 form. So, with all of that said, please enjoy this rendition of 32 Teams/32 Days: The Minnesota Vikings.

2018 Offseason

We ended up going a little long, so these first two sections are going to be in the comments. Sorry!

Week-by-Week Season Review

Team Stats

Written by u/XstarshooterX
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OFFENSIVE STATS

Category	Stats	Difference from 2017	Rank in NFL
Total Yards	5,529	-181	20th
Yards/Game	345.6	-11.3	20th
Total Passing Yards	4,036	+283	13th
Yards/Play	5.5	+0.1	N/A
Passing Yards/Game	252.25	+17.7	13th
Total Rushing Yards	1,493	-464	30th
Rushing Yards/Game	93.3	-29	30th
Points/Game	22.5	-1.4	19th
Avg Points/Drive	1.8	-.23	24th
Turnovers	20	+6	16th
Total First Downs	310	-24	22nd

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DEFENSIVE STATS

Category	Stats	Difference from 2017	Rank in NFL
Total Yards Allowed	4,955	+540	4th
Passing Yards Allowed	3,140	+78	3rd
Rushing Yards Allowed	1,815	+478	15th
Yards Allowed/Game	309.69	+33.75	4th
Yards Allowed/Play	5.0	+0.4	N/A
Points Allowed/Game	21.31	+5.56	9th
Avg Points Allowed/Drive	1.63	+0.28	3rd
Takeaways	20	+1	16th
First Downs Allowed	303	+43	7th

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Three Things to Know:

1. Our rushing defense got WAY worse. So much worse that it can't all be explained just by us playing from behind more often.
2. Notice our total points allowed was ninth. Our points/drive was 3rd. This shows how often the defense was on the field and put in bad situations by the offense.
3. The one stat we improved on from 2017 was takeaways, and it was only by one.

Season Highs and Lows

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Low Points:

• The loss of offensive line coach Tony Sparano deeply affected the Minnesota Vikings both on and off of the field. Last July, Sparano died suddenly in his Eden Prairie home due to an abrupt heart failure. The passing shocked the Minnesota Vikings and rest of the NFL. Sparano was loved by not only his offensive linemen, but every player on the team. His no-nonsense attitude made him popular with rookies and veterans alike, and he was sorely missed this season. It is hard to quantify how impactful the death of Tony Sparano was on the field, but it was clear that the offensive line lacked the direction they did the year prior. After years of being one of the worst offensive lines in the league, the 2017 Vikings seemed to be improving thanks to coach Sparano. Although his tenure in Minnesota was short, he will always be remembered fondly for contributing to the Vikings' magical 2017 season.
• Another off-the-field issue that weighed on the back of the team's mind was the departure of Everson Griffen halfway through the season. After missing Week 3's defeat to the Buffalo Bills, it was revealed that Griffen was currently seeking help over apparent mental health issues. Much of the situation was clouded by rumors, but there was no doubting that the veteran defensive end was missed. In total, Griffen missed six games, returning for the team's Week 8 matchup against the New Orleans Saints.
• Originally, this was going to be about the Vikings' Week 3 loss to the Bills, but I'd like to instead talk about all of Kirk Cousins' fumbles this year. Cousins fumbled ten times this season, usually at the worst possible time. In at least three games (Weeks 3, 4, and 14), Cousins' looseness with the football essentially iced the game. This isn't even including some of his disastrous pick-sixes, which in itself lost a handful of games. Kirk Cousins had a great year on paper, but in game-defining situations he always seemed to be the problem, not the solution.

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High Points:

• The Vikings' Week 5 win against the Eagles was great for the team's morale and provided us with the team's best play of the year. Linval Joseph's iconic touchdown return caused minnesotavikings to be flooded with shitposts like this, and the play was broadcasted on highlight reels across the league. The win also allowed the Vikings to get revenge on the defending Super Bowl champions who had spoiled their own postseason run many moons ago. In addition, it was their only win against a playoff team in 2018.
• The Minnesota Vikings' 2018 season can't be explained without mentioning Adam Thielen's insane stretch of games to start the season. In the first eight weeks of the season, Thielen tied the NFL record for most consecutive 100-yard receiving games and set the record for most consecutive 100-yard receiving games to begin a season. The insane run made him a front-runner for the "best receiver in the NFL" debate, with 74 catches for 925 yards and six touchdowns. His production slowed down significantly in the second half of the year, but Thielen's dominance was something to behold up until Week 9.

Coaching Staff Review

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Head Coach- Mike Zimmer
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Although he can be a bit of a jerk at times, there's no doubting that Mike Zimmer is an excellent head coach. Since joining the team in 2014, Minnesota's defense has been one of the best in the NFL. This trend continued this season, with the Vikings ranking in the top ten for both points and yards allowed. His coaching style is, in a word, traditional. Zimmer's bread and butter is a strong defense, dominant running game, and having a quarterback that makes little mistakes. We saw shades of that in 2018, but the offense needs to improve to allow more complimentary gameplay.
If there is anywhere where you can fault coach Zimmer, it is with his mismanagement of the offensive side of the ball. Since his tenure began, the Vikings have had seven quarterbacks start under center. Most of the time, those seven quarterbacks have been given little to no protection behind one of the league's worst offensive lines. However, Zimmer seems to dodge most of this criticism by being labeled as a "defensive-minded" coach. While these issues certainly haven't been all his fault, there will be some concern with Zimmer if this continues.
All in all, Mike Zimmer is a good head coach that the Minnesota Vikings are lucky to have. In his five years with the team, the Vikings have won the division twice and have a win percentage of .594. He has also only had one losing season (7-9 in his first year) and led the team to their best record (13-3 in 2017) since the 1998 season. The Vikings understand how important coach Zimmer is to the team, which is why his contract was extended through the 2020 season.
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Offensive Coordinator- Kevin Stefanski / Gary Kubiak
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After John DeFilippo was relieved of his duties during the season, assistant coach Kevin Stefanski stepped in as his short-term replacement. Stefanski's offense got off to a great start, with a 41-17 blowout over the Miami Dolphins. His next few games were somewhat of a mixed bag. A win over the inept Detroit Lions started off very slow on the offensive side of the ball, and the Vikings' season finale against Chicago seemed pretty similar to their first matchup.
One of the arguments that led toward DeFilippo's demise was the running game, or lack thereof. We would often see Kirk Cousins having to shoulder the load of an entire offense while the Vikings' two talented running backs sat idly by. This wasn't as much of the case with Stefanski, who did a much better job of keeping the offense balanced. The front office was impressed with his work, and Kevin Stefanski was later named as the team's full-time offensive coordinator.
In addition to the Stefanski promotion, the Vikings also brought in Gary Kubiak to their staff as an "offensive adviser". Kubiak has 24 years of coaching experience as a head coach and offensive coordinator. His most notable stops were with the Houston Texans (2006-2013) and the Denver Broncos (2015-2016), where he won Super Bowl 50.
Kubiak is known for embracing a strong running game, something that the Vikings were lacking for most of last season. He also brought along his son, Klint (quarterbacks coach), Rick Dennison (offensive line coach), and Brian Pariani (tight ends coach). The Kubiak/Stefanski marriage will be an interesting one to watch in the coming months, and hopefully it can lead to a more balanced attack.
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Offensive Line Coach- Rick Dennsion
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As stated previously, one of the assistant coaches that moved from Denver with Gary Kubiak was offensive line coach Rick Dennison. The two have a long history thanks to their shared times in Denver. In fact, Dennison spent the vast majority of his professional career with the Broncos: as a player (1982-1990), an assistant coach (1995-2000), an offensive line coach (2001-2005), and an offensive coordinator (2006-2008, 2015-2016).
In the time that he wasn't coaching with the Broncos, he was coaching with another former Bronco: Gary Kubiak. Even through their times in Houston and Baltimore, the two coached stayed as a package deal. Since meeting in Kubiak's rookie season of 1983, the two have been very close as coworkers and friends. This made reuniting the two in Minnesota a no-brainer for both parties.
Dennison is taking over the position from interim coaches Clancy Barone and Andrew Jonocko, who filled in following the loss of Tony Sparano. Jonocko will return to his previous position of assistant offensive line coach, while Barone was relieved of his duties as tight ends coach.
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Defensive Coordinator- George Edwards
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Edwards, along with the entirety of the Vikings' defensive staff, has been with Mike Zimmer since the start of his tenure. Prior to landing in Minnesota, Edwards bounced around the league as an assistant coach and linebackers coach. One of the teams he coached was the Dallas Cowboys (1998-2001), where he met then-defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer.
Zimmer and Edwards only coached together until the 2000 season, but the two had a strong connection and kept in touch. Then, when Mike Zimmer finally landed a head coaching job with the Vikings, he reached out to his old friend, who was currently a linebackers coach in Miami. The two have been together ever since and have transformed the Vikings' defense from below-average to one of the league's best.
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Special Teams Coordinator- Marwan Maalouf
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Since 2011, Mike Priefer was the man in charge of the Minnesota Vikings' special teams. If his tenure could be remembered for one thing, it would be his work with young, talented returners like Percy Harvin, Cordarrelle Patterson, and Marcus Sherels. However, this was quickly overshadowed by the Vikings' constant kicking woes. Between Blair Walsh, Kai Forbath, Daniel Carlson, and even Dan Bailey struggling, it seemed that the common factor was Priefer's coaching.
With rumblings of displeasure growing, it seemed that the Vikings' longtime special teams coordinator may be out of a job. At the end of the season, Mike Priefer's contract was not extended, and he was free to join the NFL coaching pool. He later landed with the Cleveland Browns at the same position.
Priefer's replacement was Marwan Maalouf, who was most recently a special teams assistant coach with the Miami Dolphins. In his six-year tenure with the Dolphins, Maalouf's special teams unit was consistently above average, hitting their peak last season. The Dolphins led the league in blocked punts (eight) and field goal percentage allowed (77.1%) during his tenure. With the consistent issues in the Vikings' kicking game, Maalouf will provide a much-needed fresh face.

Roster Review

Written by u/minnesotanationalist
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All-Pros: DE Danielle Hunter (2nd-Team), S Harrison Smith (2nd-Team)
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Pro Bowlers: WR Adam Thielen, DE Danielle Hunter, LB Anthony Barr, S Harrison Smith
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Team Strengths:

• Wide Receiver- The duo of Adam Thielen and Stefon Diggs has become the best WR duo in the NFL. With both receivers putting up over 1000 yards for the first time, these two have become a dominant force. In-depth review
• Running Back- Although the Vikings didn’t produce a lot of running offense, the fault lies with the O-line. Dalvin Cook and Latavius Murray are both talented running backs who can make some impressive runs. In-depth review
• Defensive End- Danielle emerged as one the league’s elite pass rushers, Everson Griffen held down the right side when he started, and Stephen Weatherly is showing a lot of promise. In-depth review
• Safety- With one Pro Bowler in Harrison Smith and one emerging talent in Anthony Harris, the Vikings’ safety corps has the talent and versatility to consistently make plays. In-depth review
• Cornerback- After drafting another early round CB, the Vikings have an embarrassing wealth of talent in pass coverage. Xavier Rhodes and Trae Waynes are above-average starters, Mackensie Alexander had a fantastic breakout year, and Mike Hughes and Holton Hill are both promising rookies.In-depth review

Team Weaknesses:

• Offensive Line- This comes as no surprise. The Vikings' offensive line was terrible, especially compared to their improved 2017 campaign. Nearly every position along the line can use a significant upgrade, but the need at guard is most dire. In-depth review

Click here for full in-depth roster review

Upcoming Free Agents

Free Agency definitions for those who need them

Name	Position	Re-sign?	Notes
Sheldon Richardson	DT	Maybe
Latavius Murray	RB	No
Anthony Barr	LB	Maybe
Brett Jones	C	No
Nick Easton	C	Maybe	Missed all of 2018 (neck)
Dan Bailey	K	Yes
Marcus Sherels	CB	Maybe
Ameer Abdullah	RB	Maybe
Tom Johnson	DT	No
Tom Compton	G	No
George Iloka	FS	No
Aldrick Robinson	WR	No
Anthony Harris	SS	Yes	Restricted Free Agent (RFA)
Trevor Siemian	QB	No
Matt Wile	P	Yes	Signed to one-year extension on March 5th
Rashod Hill	T	Maybe	RFA
C.J Ham	RB	Yes	Singed to one-year extension on March 5th
Cedrick Lang	TE	Yes	Exclusive Rights Free Agent (ERFA)
Josiah Price	TE	Yes	ERFA

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Easy Yes'
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Dan Bailey had a very rough year, with one of the lowest field goal percentages in the NFL (75%). This is the same statistic that led to his release from the Dallas Cowboys, so saying that Bailey should be re-signed is a bit of a head-scratcher on the surface. However, Bailey hit 30 of his 31 extra point attempts and will be paired with a new special teams coordinator in Marwan Maalouf. His contract next season will most certainly be cheap, so why not give the veteran kicker another shot? After cycling through four kickers in three years, some consistency at the position would be more than welcome.
Anthony Harris was called upon in response for Andrew Sendejo going down with a groin injury and has played lights-out since. At times, Harris was as good (if not better) than Sendejo in coverage, picking off three passes in nine games. Harris played so well, in fact, that there's a possibility that he could be the team's starting strong safety going into 2019. Of all of the Vikings' soon-to-be free agents, this signing seems the most obvious.
Matt Wile and C.J Ham are both Exclusive Rights Free Agents who play little-utilized positions (punter and fullback), so their new contracts would be for pennies on the dollar. Both played well in limited time and there's no reason why either of them shouldn't be on the roster next season. EDIT: Matt Wile and C.J Ham have signed one-year extensions with the Vikings, each for $645,000. Here is a short article regarding the signings.
Tight ends Cedrick Lang and Josiah Price are also ERFAs, meaning there's no harm in re-signing them to non-guaranteed deals. Neither have played a down for the Vikings, so they are purely for depth at the position. They'll be on the roster bubble if they do in fact re-sign.
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Anthony Barr and Sheldon Richardson
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The "maybe" section will probably be the longest and most speculative portion of the three. The two biggest names that are set to leave are linebacker Anthony Barr and defensive tackle Sheldon Richardson. There's a lot to talk about with these two, so let's dive into Barr first.
Anthony Barr was Mike Zimmer's very first draft pick when he joined the team, and the raw linebacker from UCLA looked like he could be a star if developed correctly. Fast forward five seasons and Barr has built himself a rather impressive resume. He has four Pro Bowl selections to his name and has been a fixture in the Vikings' top-ten defense. However, despite playing well, there might not be enough to warrant a massive extension. He is the classic case of a "good, not great" player looking to be paid like a top performer at his position.
There's little known information on what Barr is looking for in his contract, but it will likely be around the $12 million range that he earned in 2018. With limited cap space and a defense already stacked with talent, is there really a need to dish out the big bucks for an above-average linebacker? Personally, I'd love to keep Barr paired with his college teammate (and best friend) Eric Kendricks, but $12 million per year is a little too steep. It should also be noted that the Vikings allegedly attempted to trade Barr during the 2018 season, making his return even less likely.
During last offseason, the Vikings decided to take a one-year rental deal on former Jet and Seahawk Sheldon Richardson. The investment paid off for both parties. Richardson had his best statistical year since 2015, with 4.5 sacks and 16 quarterback hits. He and Linval Joseph made a dynamic duo in the middle of the Vikings' defense, but it's uncertain if they'll be able to pair up again next season.
Unfortunately, the Richardson situation is very similar to Anthony Barr's. The Vikings are very deep at the defensive tackle position, with Jaleel Johnson and former fourth-round pick Jalyn Holmes waiting in the wings. Johnson and Holmes are still on their rookie deals, making them a far more affordable option than Richardson's possible $10+ million per year. Although he is more likely to be re-signed than Barr, the possibility of him landing a big contract elsewhere seems the most probable.
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The Other "Maybe"s
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The following players are all seasoned veterans that would be nice depth signings, but at the same time are expendable. Nick Easton is one of the biggest question marks, who missed all of the 2018 season due to a neck injury. The nimble guard played well in 2017, and appeared to be on the path for a new deal in Minnesota. He and then-rookie Pat Elflein provided a solid interior to a troubled offensive line. He is a decent player, but the likelihood of him staying with the Vikings drops significantly with his injury.
It's almost a running joke how long Marcus Sherels can manage to be on the team's roster bubble every year. Despite the Vikings' insane depth at cornerback, Sherels always seems to make the final 53-man roster. He's still a good punt returner, but at 31 years old, it may be time to allow Mike Hughes to take over returning duties.
Ameer Abdullah didn't have a single carry for the Vikings this season, but it is possible that the team keeps him around as a change-of-pace back. With Latavius Murray likely gone, Abdullah provides good insurance in the event that undrafted free agents Mike Boone and Roc Thomas don't perform well. Speaking of insurance, right tackle Rashod Hill could also be in the market for a low-value deal. He's nothing special but will be a decent backup to Brian O'Neill.
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Thanks, but No Thanks
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Latavius Murray is one of the hardest players to categorize in this section. The Vikings would certainly like him to return. Murray had a handful of great games in place of an injured Dalvin Cook, and the two backs complement each other's skills nicely. However, Cook is the clear lead back, and Murray has no intentions of being a backup. Despite being 29 years old and having a downhill-running style, the former UCF Knight sees himself as a potential lead back. The only way in which Murray is likely to return to Minnesota is if he swallows his pride and accepts a reduced role behind Dalvin Cook.
The Vikings allowed Tom Johnson to walk last year in free agency, and it's likely they're willing to let that happen again. Johnson will be 35 next season and has two promising players behind him on the depth chart (Jaleel Johnson and Jalyn Holmes). Johnson has had a great tenure in Minnesota as a rotational inside pass rusher, but it may be time to say goodbye to "Sebastian Thunderbucket".
Tom Compton started 14 games in place of Nick Easton and that's about it. Compton played very poorly and it's unlikely that he will be the team's starting guard again next season. Unless he is returning as a backup, I am perfectly fine with letting him leave for greener pastures. The same can be said for backup quarterback Trevor Siemian, who the Vikings traded for last offseason. He's an experienced veteran and a solid backup, but Kyle Sloter could be pushing for the Vikes' #2 quarterback gig. Sloter outperformed Siemian by a mile during the preseason, so the team may elect to go with the player with the higher ceiling (and lower cost).

Possible Cap Casualties

The following is a list of Vikings players that could possibly be released in order to free up cap space heading into free agency. These selections are COMPLETELY speculative and are not meant as cut predictions.

Name	Position	2019 Cap Hit	Notes
Andrew Sendejo	S	$5.5 million	31 years old and losing ground to Anthony Harris
Mike Remmers	G/T	$6.3 million	Replaced by Brian O'Neill then underperformed at guard
Kyle Rudolph	TE	$7.6 million
Everson Griffin	DE	$11.7 million	Recently rumored to be on trade block
Trae Waynes	CB	$9.1 million	Recently rumored to be on trade block

Andrew Sendejo has been a possible cut candidate for a season or two now, but this season the possibility of that happening seems more real. Sendejo is a hard-hitting safety that gives up the occasional big play and has a history of being injured. In fact, Sendejo hasn't played a full 16-game season since 2014. This point is pressed further with the outstanding play of Anthony Harris, who covered for Sendejo in his absence. If he were to be released, the Vikings would open up $5.5 million in cap space with no dead money.
Looking back, the 2017 offseason signing of tackle Mike Remmers seems to be worse and worse of an idea. Remmers started as the Vikings' right tackle in 2017, only to be replaced by rookie Brian O'Neill the year after. The coaching staff decided to move Remmers inside to right guard, but to no avail; He was ranked as the league's 48th-best guard, per Pro Football Focus. Simply put, Mike Remmers is not worth his 5-year, $30 million contract. Releasing Remmers would free $6.3 million in cap space and result in $1.8 million in dead money.
Here's where things get interesting. Tight end Kyle Rudolph has had a very productive career with the Vikings. He's been a solid, reliable target in the receiving game even when the Vikings had next to no talent at the wide receiver position. He even had a decent 2018 campaign, with 64 catches for 634 yards. However, there seems to be growing displeasure over how much the two-time Pro Bowler is being paid. $7.6 million is a steep price for an above-average tight end. Allegedly, the Vikings have reached out to Rudolph to restructure his contract, to which he rejected. Although cutting Rudolph would be a pretty big surprise, it's a situation worth monitoring within the next few months.
Similarly, the Vikings have also contacted defensive end Everson Griffen in order to maneuver some more cap space. Griffen also rejected, leaving the Vikings' front office with a difficult choice: absorb his massive cap hit for another season or dump off his contract to a team needing a pass-rusher. Griffen is still a very talented defensive end, but Danielle Hunter is now the premier player on their defensive line, and there's no need to pay such a hefty price for Griffen. In the last few days there have been reports that the Vikings could possibly trade Griffen, although this seems to be more speculation than anything.
Cornerback Trae Waynes has seen the majority of trade rumors for the Vikings so far, and not without good reasons. Waynes is due $9.1 million in 2019 due to his fifth-year option being exercised, which is a high price for a #2 corner. The Vikings are also stacked at cornerback, with Xavier Rhodes, Mike Hughes, and Holton Hill also on the roster. Nevertheless, Waynes is a talented player that has consistently shown improvement throughout his time in Minnesota. The Vikings are willing to trade him, but only for the right price.

Offseason Needs

Written by u/minnesotanationalist
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Interior Offensive Line
It’s no secret that the most important change the Vikings need to make this season is among their interior offensive line, which was the worst in the NFL. Multiple additions need to be brought in, preferably both guards.
For free agency, the lack of cap space really hurts the Vikings as many of the starters to hit free agency will be looking for big contracts that the Vikings probably won’t be able to fulfill unless they make some other changes to their roster. The most prominent free agents are guards Rodger Saffold (LAR) and Quinton Spain (TEN), and centers Matt Paradis (DEN) and Mitch Morse (KC).
Given the steep price of many of these players, the Vikings will take at most one of them, and Saffold and Paradis might be out of their price range. I’d say the most likely free agent addition would be Spain, who previously served as the left guard for the Titans. He was a solid pass protector who wouldn’t command too much money.
For the draft, the Vikings should also be looking to pick an interior lineman in the first two rounds. With the 18th pick, top OL prospects Jonah Williams (Alabama) and Greg Little (Mississippi) probably being out of reach, the best remaining pick for the Vikings would be Cody Ford (Oklahoma).
Other top guard prospects include Dalton Risner (Kansas State), Chris Lindstrom (Boston College), and Beau Benzschawel (Wisconsin). Top center prospects include Garrett Bradbury (NC State), Erik McCoy (Texas A&M), and Michael Jordan (Ohio State).
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Wide Receiver
Despite having the best WR duo in the NFL, the Vikings are still lacking a real WR3, especially someone who can serve as a deep threat. The Vikings need somebody who can work with blazing speed alongside their established route runners.
For free agency, there aren’t a lot of players who would be able to make a meaningful addition to the team while also commanding a reasonable salary for a WR3. There’s a decent chance the Vikings won’t take anyone in free agency due to their limited cap space, but some possibilities include John Brown (BAL), who could give the Vikings the speed and vertical gamestyle they need, and he could be a fantastic contributor if he can fix his drop issues. Another possibility could be Jamison Crowder (WAS) due to his familiarity with Cousins from back in Washington.
For the draft, the Vikings probably won’t be taking any receivers in the first two or three rounds as they should be focusing on interior o-linemen and a BarRichardson replacement if needed. It’s hard to tell who could be a third-day draft pickup, but if they wanted to go for a receiver a little earlier, possible selections include Marquise Brown (Oklahoma) and Riley Ridley (Georgia), both of whom have the speed and talent to be a big contributor on the Vikings’ offense.
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Outside Linebacker
Since there is a pretty good chance Anthony Barr won’t be returning to the Vikings next year, they need to find somebody to take on his role as a big, powerful outside linebacker who can rush the passer when needed.
For free agency, two possible pickups for the Vikings would be Jordan Hicks (PHI) and KJ Wright (SEA). Both of them have the size and speed to be quality linebackers, and would be able to fulfill essentially the same tasks as Barr. They both also have experience in the league for teams with quality defense, so they could fit in well with a system like Zimmer’s.
For the draft, the Vikings might also be looking at top OLB prospects if they don’t like any of the iOL options in the first or second round. Possible selections include Tre Lamar (Clemson), and Vosean Joseph (Florida), who both have the size and potential to be the starting SLB in place of Barr.

Conclusion

It was a turbulent year for the Minnesota Vikings, but there's still plenty of hope. Most of the team's key players are locked up through 2020. Kirk Cousins has a full offseason to blend with the team, which will (hopefully) lead to less miscommunications next season. Aside from the offensive line, the Vikings have very few weaknesses and remain a strong, well-rounded team.
When I think of the Minnesota Vikings' 2018 season, I'm reminded of a specific quote from Helen Keller: "Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." In my mind, this entire season was the team's experience of trial and suffering. Through off-the-field tragedies and heartbreaking losses, there is no doubt in my mind that the Vikings will be a stronger team moving forward. Whether that mental fortitude translates to wins remains to be seen, but there is still reason to believe that this team will be one to be reckoned with in the coming seasons.
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Thank you so much for reading this rendition of 32 Teams/32 Days!! I'd like to give a special shoutout to u/minnesotanationalist and u/XstarshooterX for helping me throw this together. This was a massive project and both writers did an amazing job with finishing this on time. I'd also like to thank u/therealDoctorKay for organizing the series and all of the other team writers for their fantastic work. See you all for the offseason recap series! Skol!

Post Hub

Welcome to the /MLS Sporting Kansas City Countdown to Kickoff!

If you fancy a trip back in time, here are 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.
Now on with the show!
Team Name: Sporting Kansas City Head Coach: Peter Vermes Technical Director: Brian Bliss Captain: Matt Besler Stadium: Children’s Mercy Park, Kansas City, KS Ownership: Sporting Club Mascot: Blue the Dog Kits: Primary, Secondary Supporters Groups: The Cauldron Subreddit: /SportingKC USL Championship Affiliate: Swope Park Rangers News and Commentary: The Blue Testament, The Full 90, Talkin' Touches Podcast, No Other Pod Twitter Follows: Sam McDowell, Andy Edwards, Chad Smith, Mike
History: • MLS Cup: 2000, 2013 • Supporters’ Shield: 2000 • US Open Cup: 2004, 2012, 2015, 2017 Coaches: • Ron Newman (1996-1999) • Bob Gansler (1999-2006) • Curt Onalfo (2006-2009) • Peter Vermes (2009-Present)
Sporting Legends: • Winger Predrag “Preki” Radosavljevic (1996-2000/2002-2005) • GK Tony Meola (1999-2004) • Coach Bob Gansler (1999-2006) • Defender Jimmy Conrad (2003-2010) • DefendeCoach Peter Vermes (2000-2002/2009-Present) • Owner Lamar Hunt (1995-2006) • Midfielder Chris Klein (1998-2005) • MidfieldeAssistant Coach Kerry Zavagnin (2000-2008/2009-Present) • Forward Mo Johnston (1996-2001)
2019 Season Opener: Sunday, March 3rd at Los Angeles FC
2019 Home Opener: Sunday, March 10th vs. Philadelphia Union
Preseason Roster
Predicted Preferred Gameday 18: 4-3-3

-------------------Nemeth------------------- --Salloi---------------------------Russell-- ------------Felipe-------Espinoza----------- --------------------Ilie-------------------- -Sinovic------Besler----Fontas---------Zusi- -------------------Melia-------------------- 

Subs: Zendejas, Borath, Wallace, Rowe, Croizet, Gerso, Hurtado
Note: This will likely not be the Starting XI on Opening Day due to CCL.

2018 Overview

Western Conference Table

Pos.	Team	GP	W	L	T	GF	GA	GD	Pts.
1	Sporting Kansas City	34	18	8	8	65	40	+25	62
2	Seattle Sounders	34	18	11	5	52	37	+15	59
3	Los Angeles FC	34	16	9	9	68	52	+16	57

Offensive Leaders

Player	Minutes	Goals	Assists
Daniel Salloi	2291	11	7
Johnny Russell	2183	10	10
Diego Rubio	781	8	6
Felipe Gutierrez	1522	7	2
Gerso Fernandes	1591	5	5
Roger Espinoza	2825	3	9
Graham Zusi	3060	2	7

Season Review

Kansas City fans knew that 2018 was going to be a different kind of season when, in the course of the first four games, Sporting both scored and conceded nine goals - it was clear that this would probably not be another year of cagey one-goal affairs. Fortunately, after the disheartening 0-2 loss to NYC to start the year, the results were more often than not in Sporting’s favor. Things seemed to take a turn for the worse beginning at the end of June, leaving people wondering if Sporting’s perennial late-summer slump had come early. Things got a little dire, with the team taking just one point from five matches, but from August onward, the team finished strong, with a 9-2-2 record from their final 13 games. In the end, Sporting had their best regular season since 2012, finishing atop the Western Conference and third in the Supporters’ Shield standings. For the first time since 2013, Children’s Mercy Park got to host a playoff game, seeing the home side best Real Salt Lake 4-2 (5-3 agg.). Following a scoreless draw at Providence Park in the first leg of the Western Conference Final, the Timbers (by way of Sebastian Blanco and Diego Valeri) dealt Sporting KC a knockout blow in a 3-2 loss.
On the player personnel side, 2018 will likely prove to be an important season in determining the team’s fortunes for a number of years. In addition to signing three new higher-value players in Johnny Russell, Yohan Croizet, and Felipe Gutierrez, the club signed new long-term contracts* with several of their core players - Matt Besler, Graham Zusi, Ilie Sanchez, and Roger Espinoza.** The club also continued to display its faith in its young talents, giving first-team debuts to homegrown players Jaylin Lindsey, Wan Kuzain Wan Kamal, and Gianluca Busio.
While Sporting KC continued (and continues) to play almost exclusively in a 4-3-3, gone are the days of a balls-to-the-wall high press. 2018 saw Peter Vermes continue evolving his team into one that places a lot of value on possession and playing out of the back - SKC finished in the top five for overall possession and pass accuracy. On the field, fans saw Zusi, Espinoza, and Russell develop a chemistry that allowed for unique positional interplay down the right flank.
*Salary numbers for the new contracts have not been released though the KC Star reported that Ilie would join the other three above the max salary cap hit of ~$500k.
**Besler and Espinoza through 2020, Zusi and Sanchez through 2021 (Sinovic was also signed through the 2019 season)

2018 Highlights and Lowlights

Highlight: Breaking the club record for goals scored in a single season. Lowlight: Serious regression for the defense that was hands down the best defense of 2017.

-dramaticchipotle

Highlight: The small name, big impact players we got in Johnny Russell and Felipe Gutierrez. SKC always does well with getting good players that are not household names, these two were a revelation. Lowlight: Tough performances in the Portland series, but we did win a playoff round. I’d argue discovering how fucked we were when other teams keyed in on Ilìe was also a low point.

-WrapLife

Highlight: Blanking Atlanta at Mercedes-Benz Stadium Lowlight: The loss to Philadelphia’s B-team ahead of their trip to the US Open Cup Final

-dd12939

Highlights: Record goalscoring, exciting soccer, winning more games in California than the Quakes, 9-2-2 in our last 13 regular season games, 2-0 against Atlanta, beating RSL in our first home playoff game since 2013, Salloi no-look goal, Zusi being a fantasy god, Busio bossing Houston, beating Houston twice, and having a huge defensive drop off to still be the 4th best defense in the league. Lowlights: July, losing to Philly's backups, 1 point against RSL in the regular season, losing 2-0 in the home opener, Portland doing Portland things in the playoffs, and not bringing home a single trophy.

-overscore_

Transfers Out

Pos.	Player	Via	To	Info
F	Diego Rubio	Trade	Colorado Rapids	Part of 3-way trade which brought Kelyn Rowe to KC
F	Kharlton Belmar	Option Declined	Nashville SC	-
F	Khiry Shelton	Out of Contract	SC Paderborn 07	Wanted to try his luck in Europe. Got injured.
M	Cristian Lobato	Option Declined	UE Cornellà	-
D	Ike Opara	Trade	Minnesota United FC	KC received $900k TAM, increasing to $1 million if the Loons make the playoffs.
D	Brad Evans	Option Declined	Retired	-
D	Amer Didic	Option Declined	San Antonio FC	-
D	Colton Storm	Option Declined	-	-

Diego Rubio: Sporting’s Chilean striker spent much of 2018 playing the super-sub role, coming off the bench for Khiry Shelton. Though he played fewer than 800 minutes, he tallied an impressive 8 goals and 6 assists. He will spend 2019 in Colorado with former SKC men Benny Feilhaber and Kei Kamara.
Khiry Shelton: Though he only managed 2 goals in nearly 1400 minutes, the former NYCFC striker’s hold-up play proved to be an integral part of SKC’s attack. With his departure, Peter Vermes will lack any sort of physically-imposing center forward as an option.
Ike Opara: It is with a heavy heart that the SKC faithful bid Ike Opara a fond farewell. Though he suffered a number of serious injuries during his six years in Kansas City, when healthy, there were few defenders who could match his abilities in both boxes. The 2017 MLS Defender of the Year will head up I-35 to Minnesota in exchange for $900,000 (or more) in Targeted Allocation Money.
Brad Evans: A league legend who needs little introduction, Brad Evans joined Sporting KC as a free agent before the 2018 season. Injured for the large parts of the year, he managed to not play a single minute for the first team. May he have a happy, healthy, and prosperous retirement.

Transfers In

Pos.	Player	Via	From	Info
F	Erik Hurtado	Trade	Vancouver Whitecaps FC	Exchanged for draft picks in 2020 and 2021.
F	Tyler Freeman	Homegrown Signing	Sporting KC Academy	16-year-old HGP.
M	Kelyn Rowe	Trade	New England Revolution	Part of 3-way trade that sent Diego Rubio to Colorado.
D/M	Rodney Wallace	Free Agent	New York City FC	Will challenge for starting LB position and provide depth on the wing.
D	Botond Barath	Free Transfer	Budapest Honved FC	26-year-old fringe Hungarian international. Likely third on center-back depth chart.
D	Abdul Rwatubyaye	Transfer Fee	Rayon Sports	22-year-old Rwandan international.

Erik Hurtado: The 28-year-old center forward joins SKC after having spent his entire professional career in Vancouver. Never a prolific goalscorer, Hurtado has most often been a bench option and is likely to continue that role in Kansas City. Look for Peter Vermes to use him similarly to how Diego Rubio was deployed in 2018.
Tyler Freeman: Though he signed a contract with Sporting KC last October, the 16-year-old Kansas native officially joined the team with the opening of the winter transfer window. Freeman has featured for the U.S. National Team at the U-14, U-16, and U-17 levels. He is likely to spend most of his time on loan with the Swope Park Rangers, but could very well make a few appearances for the first team a la Gianluca Busio.
Kelyn Rowe: A seven-year veteran midfielder with the New England Revolution, the Federal Way, WA, native came to Kansas City as part of the three-way trade that sent Diego Rubio to Colorado. Having played as a midfielder, winger, and fullback for New England, Rowe brings a wealth of experience and versatility to SKC, though in preseason he has featured primarily in the middle of the park, battling with Roger Espinoza for minutes. Rowe has earned four caps with the USMNT and will certainly look to use his opportunity with a new club as a chance to catch Gregg Berhalter’s attention.
Rodney Wallace: The 30-year-old Costa Rican international joined Sporting KC as a free agent after stops in D.C., Portland, and New York City. Primarily a left-sided player, Wallace is comfortable as a fullback or winger, so look for him to add valuable depth at both positions. After a down year in which he only played 800 minutes in NYC, expect him to try to push into the starting XI.
Botond Barath: The latest addition coming from Peter Vermes’s Hungarian connection, 26-year-old center back Botond Barath should begin the year as third man on the depth chart for that position. Having played his entire career as yet with his childhood club, Budapest Honvéd FC, he has recently broken into the Hungarian national team, earning his first three caps since last October. Depending on his performance in training (along with that of lefties Besler and Fontas), he could push for a starting job given his right-footedness.
Abdul Rwatubyaye: The only Rwandan in MLS, the 22-year-old center back comes to the league with three Rwanda Premier League titles and 22 caps with the Rwandan national team. It is worth noting that Rwatubyaye (GWAH-too-BYAH-yay) came to the attention of Sporting’s front office by way of the same scout who brought us Latif Blessing. Expect him to start the year with Swope Park.

Returning Players

The Vets

Roger Espinoza: A bulldog in the central midfield, Honduran international Roger Espinoza was drafted by Sporting KC in 2008. Apart from two seasons he spent in England with Wigan, Espinoza has been a mainstay in the middle of the field, playing as a box-to-box destroyer. In 2019’s preseason, new signing Kelyn Rowe seems to be challenging for Espinoza’s minutes, though Sporting’s veteran was still given both starts in CCL against Toluca. Regardless, he will doubtless be an important piece for the club as it tries to balance CCL, MLS, and US Open Cup play.
Matt Besler: Drafted in 2009 by the then-Kansas City Wizards, hometown hero Matt Besler has long been a stalwart in Peter Vermes’ defense. Apart from a down year in 2016, Besler has been one of the most consistent players in recent memory and there’s little reason to think 2019 will be any different. The 2018 MLS All-Star and Opta Best XI member will likely have to make some minor adjustments to his game as he gets used to a new center back partner, but he has looked sharp through Sporting’s preseason and early CCL fixtures.
Graham Zusi: Zusi has been a near-constant presence on the wing for Sporting since he was drafted in 2009, though since the beginning of 2017 he has become Peter Vermes’ go-to right back. 2018 saw the Opta Best XI defender deployed in a somewhat unorthodox manner, often tucking inside as he pushed up the field and being an integral part of Sporting’s success as a high-possession team. He seemed to take a more conservative and defensive stance in Sporting’s first CCL leg against Toluca while Sinovic pushed higher up the field on the left. Was that just a wrinkle for the Toluca matchup or is that a preview of what’s to come?
Seth Sinovic: This Kansas City-born fullback who grew up playing club soccer with Matt Besler has been with Sporting KC since 2011. Though Peter Vermes seems to try to replace him with some frequency, he has always ended up back in the starting spot before too long. 2019’s main challenger appears to be new acquisition Rodney Wallace.
Tim Melia: The 2017 MLS Goalkeeper of the Year should need little introduction at this point, nor should his storied career move from Rochester Rhinos’ backup to MLS pool goalkeeper to his current tenure with Sporting Kansas City. While Melia, along with the rest of the backline, performed slightly-less-well than in 2017, he was still among the league leaders in goals against average, save percentage, and penalty kick saves.
Jimmy Medranda: One of Sporting’s most entertaining players on the field, Jimmy Medranda has been out of action with a long-term knee injury since May. Fans hope to see the versatile 25-year-old Columbian back in action by July.

The New Core

Johnny Russell: Scottish winger Johnny Russell returns for his second year in Kansas City having made himself a favorite both on and off the field. Most often deployed as an inverted right winger, his strength and skill terrorized defenses as he contributed 10 goals and 10 assists in 30 games last season.
Daniel Salloi: 2018 saw Sporting’s one and only Hungarian Homegrown, 22-year-old Daniel Salloi, grow into an integral part of the team’s attack. In addition to winning the team’s golden boot with 11 goals, he contributed 7 assists, most often coming in from the left wing. Rumors regarding a return to Europe for Salloi have already begun to surface, so Sporting will likely have to decide soon whether to cash in or give the young attacker a considerable pay raise.
Ilie: The 28-year-old Spanish midfielder is a product of the Barcelona academy and played for Barcelona B for five seasons before a short stint in 2. Bundesliga with 1860 Munich. After joining SKC in 2017, he locked down the starting defensive midfield spot, starting 67 of 68 league games over two years and becoming an essential part of the team’s midfield structure. The 2018 MLS All-Star seemed to be asked to play slightly higher up the pitch in his second season, more directly facilitating Sporting’s attack. If early performances from 2019 are any indication, fans can expect more of the same this season.
Felipe Gutiérrez: Chilean midfielder Felipe Gutierrez took the league by storm upon arriving, scoring five goals in his first five matches and winning MLS Player of the Month in March 2018. Disappointingly, he was soon beset by injury and missed a considerable portion of the season. He was a little bit slow to return to full fitness after recovering, but seemed to be back to 100% by the end of the season. Spending time as both a no. 8 and a no. 10, he is a very good passer of the ball, but is also goal-dangerous, often making late runs into the box.

Something to Prove

Krisztian Nemeth: A couple years after a messy breakup following the 2015 season, Nemeth returned to Kansas City in a trade with New England in the summer of 2018. Since rejoining the team, he played fewer than 400 minutes and only contributed one goal. Having lost both Shelton and Rubio, SKC is depending on Nemeth to rediscover some of what made him so exciting during his first stint with the club.
Yohan Croizet: Sporting’s 27-year-old French designated player had, by most accounts, a disappointing 2018, with the notable exception of the world-class goal he scored against FC Dallas in the US Open Cup. He contributed only 3 goals and 3 assists in 1600 minutes, with the bulk of that time spent either in the midfield or on the wing (though he also had a completely forgettable outing as a center forward and one decidedly respectable start at left back). To this writer’s eyes, Croizet seemed to be gaining confidence toward the end of the season, so there is hope that he can become a more integral member of the squad. That said, Kelyn Rowe, Gianluca Busio, and Rodney Wallace all bring extra depth to the positions he has played, so he will have to earn his minutes.
Andreu Fontas: Signed in August of 2018 after six years in La Liga, the 29-year-old Spanish center back only logged 92 minutes last season. With Ike Opara moving north to Minnesota, Fontas seems to be the next man up for the spot next to Matt Besler. Fans will be watching to see if he can live up to both the man he’s replacing and his considerable salary.
Gerso Fernandes: He was our golden boot winner two years ago, albeit in an offensively dry sort of year. 5g/5a last season is a decent sub haul. Due to Salloi's fitness I think, he got both CCL starts and looked terrific. I know Daniel is the bright young prospect, but there may be a serious fight for who gets the bulk of the minutes this season between those two. Salloi is a much smoother player on the ball, but Gerso's athleticism combined with occasionally brilliant first touch means on about any day, he can make a goal-threat impact. Special thanks to Sporkedup for this.

The Kids

Jaylin Lindsey: Though Lindsey, an 18-year-old Homegrown player, is a natural right back, all his first team appearances in 2018 came at left back. A regular with the U.S. U-20s, expect to see Lindsey build on his minutes from last year, spelling Graham Zusi at right back in 2019.
Wan Kuzain Wan Kamal: Highly touted as a product of Sporting’s “pathway” from the Academy through Swope Park Rangers to the first team, Wan Kuzain Wan Kamal, 20, spent most of 2018 on loan with the Rangers, though he got 300 minutes with the first team, and scored one goal. Though largely unproven at the MLS level, he is probably the mostly likely candidate to back up Ilie Sanchez at defensive midfield in 2019.
Gianluca Busio: Sporting KC’s most promising prospect, 16-year-old Homegrown player Gianluca Busio, was the second-youngest player to ever sign an MLS contract, and is the second-youngest goal scorer in MLS history (thanks a lot, Freddy Adu). In 2018 he played just 150 minutes with SKC as an attacking midfielder, but in that time never looked overawed or out of place, often playing calm and simple passes to progress the game. The US youth international hopes to have a big year in 2019 and eventually follow other MLS Homegrowns like Davies and Adams to Europe.

2019 Preview

Things to Watch

Number 9… Number 9… Number 9...
Since Dom Dwyer was traded to Orlando City in July 2017, it seems like no question has defined Sporting KC more than “when are you going to sign a new striker?” Every transfer window, more and more rumors surface about high-profile attackers being linked with the club, but in every case thus far, the window has closed without a move getting done. Heading into 2019, it seems like the job is Krisztian Nemeth’s to lose, and fans were relieved to see him find the back of the net and create several chances in SKC’s opening CCL game against Toluca. Despite this, many fans are still clamoring for the club to bring in a more proven option, and if Nemeth’s early performance is a false flag, perhaps SKC will look outside the club in the summer window.
We Like(d) Ike
While 2018’s defensive performance was somewhat lackluster compared to 2017’s league-leading lockdown, it was still among the best in the league in terms of goals allowed. While the move to send 2017 MLS Defender of the Year Ike Opara up I-35 to Minnesota was not entirely surprising, losing a near-universal fan favorite who also happens to be a really good soccer player is never easy. On the field, Andreu Fontas is the clear replacement and should be a good addition to a team that is becoming more and more dependent on ball possession. That said, Sporting will definitely miss Ike’s aerial prowess, recovery speed, and his singular ability to clean up after his teammates.
#PlayYourKids
Discussions surrounding strong MLS academies often focus on the Red Bulls, FC Dallas, and Real Salt Lake, and with NY homegrown Tyler Adams being sold to Leipzig and former FCD academy director Luchi Gonzalez taking over as head coach, that isn’t likely to change any time soon. Peter Vermes wants to be part of that conversation though, stating time and again that his dream is to field a starting XI made up of all homegrown players who followed the ‘pipeline’ from the academy through the USL side and up to the first team. 2018 was a breakout year for Daniel Salloi, and saw debuts from promising youngsters Jaylin Lindsey, Wan Kuzain Wan Kamal, and Gianluca Busio. While the team’s depth means that every player will have to earn their minutes, expect all three to see the field more this season. Also joining the fray in 2019 is 16-year-old forward Tyler Freeman.
No More Iron Men
Taking a note from KC Star beat writer Sam McDowell, it’s highly unlikely that we will see any player, let alone three, play every minute of every match in 2019*. Many of the players fans have counted on seeing game in and game out are now on the wrong side of 30 and shouldn’t be expected to go the full 90 once or twice a week. Peter Vermes has been very open about his desire to build enough team depth that he could field two separate squads and it seems as though he’s been reasonably successful in doing so. In particular, look for hardworking veterans Zusi and Espinoza to be spelled by Lindsey and Rowe.
*Graham Zusi, Ilie Sanchez, and Tim Melia all played 3060 regular season minutes

Prognosis

Sporting KC has a deeper squad than ever before with a solid mix of top-end talent and solid squad players; veterans with a wealth of experience and exciting young prospects. There are good arguments to be made that they can win every trophy they compete for in 2019.
There aren’t too many obvious questions to ask of this team as long as Nemeth can produce and Fontas can pick up where Ike left off.
Realistic Best Case Scenario
In CCL, Sporting narrowly beats out Monterrey in the semifinal before falling to Tigres in the nail-biting 5-4 aggregate final series. Savvy squad rotations by Peter Vermes mean SKC avoid a noticeable dip in form for league play and the team goes on to win both the Supporters’ Shield and the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup. They make a strong playoff run before losing to Atlanta United in a smash-and-grab MLS Cup Final.* Felipe Gutierrez is a finalist for league MVP, Tim Melia regains his title of Goalkeeper of the Year, and in the offseason, Gianluca Busio is sold to Europe for an 8-figure transfer fee. Jaylin Lindsey and Wan Kuzain Wan Kamal become further integrated into the first team, playing 1,000 and 800 minutes, respectively, in all competitions.
*Don’t get mad and say “that’s not a best case scenario” because I don’t have them winning everything. That would be boring, unimaginative, and unrealistic.
Realistic Worst Case Scenario
Sporting KC’s traditionally strong defense takes a turn for the worse: teams around the league punish the center backs’ relative lack of pace, Graham Zusi is hampered by a niggling injury picked up in CCL, and Tim Melia is hung out to dry too many times. The team’s attack is middling, but no one breaks 10 goals on the season. An attempt is made to bring in a new striker in the summer transfer window, but talks break down before the deal gets done.
In CCL, Sporting is outclassed by Monterrey, losing 4-0 in the semifinal round. The aforementioned injury to Zusi, along with a few others, leave several first-teamers out of the picture and the depth players aren’t up to the challenge. The team takes a punt on the U.S. Open Cup, focusing their resources on league play. They end up sneaking into the seventh spot in the west, but are knocked out in the first round.
Realistic More Probable Scenario
Sporting KC’s biggest roster adjustment, losing Ike Opara, takes some getting used to and the team leaks a few goals early in the season before finding a system that maximizes their potential. Felipe Gutierrez and Johnny Russell take steps forward in their second seasons with both beating 10g/10a. Krisztian Nemeth isn’t the force he was in 2015, but he does well enough to stave off a new striker signing in the summer.
Sporting make it to the CCL final, but are not up to Tigres’ level. The team’s form has a noticeable dip during CCL but recovers shortly after. They win the west again but lose out to Atlanta in the Supporters’ Shield standings. The U.S. Open Cup also returns to KC in a narrow penalty-kick shootout. Sporting narrowly miss out on winning MLS Cup, losing 2-1 in Atlanta.

Swope Park Rangers

Sporting Kansas City’s USL side, the Swope Park Rangers, started play in 2016 with the intention of creating a path from the Sporting Academy to the first team. The Rangers won the USL’s Western Conference in their first two years, first under head coach Marc Dos Santos, and in their second season under Nikola Popovic. Former Sporting Kansas City midfielder Paulo Nagamura took over as head coach in the team’s third season and will continue on in 2019. Since coming into existence, the Rangers have already had several players signed to first team contracts while also offering valuable playing time to players outside of Sporting’s gameday 18.